Ensuring consistency across employee and customer experience

Gareth Hutchins at OpenText explains the need to provide a consistent experience for customers and the workforce

 

The importance of customer experience (CX) cannot be overstated. In a recent report, Forrester Research showed that businesses who lead their peers in customer experience are far more likely to grow their revenue than those that lag-behind. On top of that, companies that manage to resolve their customer’s issues quickly are 2.4 times more likely to retain the customer.

 

While all of this does mean that it would be impossible to say that CX does not matter, it does not mean that it is the be-all-and-end-all. For businesses that want to achieve sustainable growth, the real trick is ensuring that they are worrying about both customer AND employee experience simultaneously.

 

With the balance of both CX and employee experience (EX) in mind, when it comes to approach, the question a business should be asking itself is: how can we ensure that employee and customer experience are consistent within the company?

 

Why does consistency across CX and EX matter?

Given that CX can directly impact a business’s sales, many would be forgiven for focusing all of their attention on it – relegating EX to more of a “nice-to-have” role. But the reality is, the two should go hand in hand for more reasons than one.

 

Firstly, by viewing both customer and employee experience with the same lens, businesses will avoid the kind of technological silos that are created by one-sided attention.

 

Take for example, a simple product stock search. If effort is put into presenting the customer with a modern and seamless system to improve CX, but then forces employees to use an antiquated and legacy system, then not only will EX be impacted but the business now needs to maintain two systems instead of one.

 

This is exactly this kind of problem that ensuring consistency of focus across both CX and EX can help to solve.

 

How do you focus on both CX and EX simultaneously?

The first step to ensuring that both CX and EX are consistently treated as equal is subscribing to the idea of total experience. Gartner defines total experience as a business strategy that encompasses the four different experience types – employee experience, customer experience, user experience and multi-experience into one – to accelerate business growth.

 

With a total experience strategy, a business is able to bring together all of its customers and departments into a single shared digital experience. The approach paving the way to the brand creating loyalty and growth through creating relevant, digital experiences that are not only frictionless and data-driven, but also omnichannel and highly personalised.

 

Communicating the business value

Once a business has successfully devised a total experience strategy and developed ways to achieve it, you would be forgiven for thinking that the next step is simply for it to implement it.

 

Unfortunately, that is not the case. In order for the implementation to accomplish the desired lasting change, it is vital that the business first understands how to communicate its rationale.

 

Communication is vital if the business wants to achieve lasting organisation change and it must be top down – all the way from getting buy-in from C-Suite executives, to ensuring that employees understand the importance of total experience on the business’ bottom line.

 

Only by reinforcing the total experience strategy – its progress, goals, and achievements – will the business be able to ensure that the strategy is achieving the momentum and engagement that it is capable of when done right.

 

Understanding the why

The idea of why both employee and customer experience need to be consistent is not always considered (or even understood) by businesses. It can often take a step back, a look at what can be achieved, and sometimes even a little push, to truly grasp what is up for grabs if it can be done effectively.

 

So once that understanding of what can be achieved – and why it should be – is realised, a business MUST then push on and communicate effectively to capitalise and ensure that everyone across the entire organisation both understands and wants to make it a reality.

 

In all organisations, communication should be at the heart of all that it does. It does not matter if it is a matter regarding workplace culture or an organisational change going ahead, the business needs to communicate effectively to give itself the best chance of achieving success.

 

With communication, and an effective total experience strategy, businesses can avoid technological silos, utilise data more effectively, and increase efficiency. And if done effectively, better yet, it can educate, inform, and engage both customers and employees alike to achieve the kind of business growth it desires.

 

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Gareth Hutchins, Manager of Solution Architects at OpenText

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com