The Directors Club breakfast briefing seminar on 3rd April, in partnership with TTEC, saw Len Patane, VP Sales Europe, TTEC Digital, look at ways of engaging employees to deliver the very best customer experience….

Today is all about how you can influence employee experience. Your most important customer is your employee. Getting to the root cause of employee issues is not easy and as leaders in an industry employing so many people we need to think and behave like holistic healers, looking at the bigger picture and adjusting a multitude of personal, attitudinal and environmental levers.

Employee Experience (EX) – what is it and what it isn’t

The EX definition is the sum of all observations, encounters and feelings that an employee has before, during and after their employment.

Just like a customer journey an employee has a journey too, from interview and an on boarding plan to development plans and new roles or possibly redundancy. It is important to have positive touch points at all stages of the employee lifecycle. If you are going to do an exit interview, do it well and ensure they feel well looked after.

According to Deloitte 2018 Global Human Capital Trends; “Employees must provide development more regularly, provide continuous cycles of promotion and give employees more tools to manage their own careers.”

What it isn’t is a fancy perk like a flexible work policy or benefits package full of attractive options for employees. Employee experience isn’t an office with an open floor plan designed to promote more communication and collaboration. It is not any of those things in isolation.

Even good salaries are not enough, nearly nine out of ten, or 86 percent, of millennials (those between the ages of 22 and 37) would consider taking a pay cut to work at a company whose mission and values align with their own, according to LinkedIn’s latest Workplace Culture report.

EX Drivers and CX Connection

So what EX drivers do we have as leaders and HR professionals? This is all around mindset. What are the qualities of your peak performing employees? Are they committed, driven, passionate, engaged, motivated and enthusiastic?

What impacts mindset is an organisation genuinely committed to employees’ personal health, well-being and success. It is about authencity – do they feel you respect them, their career, their personal life and genuinely care? Can they trust that they are in good hands and you have their back in a crisis. Employees want to feel aligned to an organisations purpose, vision and values.

Great employee Experience drives great customer experience. According to Forrester 80% of CEO’s believe that by 2020 most companies will compete solely on CX as price and product no longer becomes a differentiator.

Traditional return on investment (ROI) metrics are no longer sufficient on their own to determine your company’s success. Evaluating whether your value proposition, capabilities, and portfolio of products and services will create shareholder value requires laser focus on how well you’re meeting higher expectations around the customer experience.

Organisations need to map consumers’ purchase journey, isolate the touch points and factors that drive experience, and then invest more in the parts of the company that will move the needle on those interactions and yield measurable results — or return on experience (ROX). ROX also needs to address whether the company is driving the behaviours in the organisation that are key to designing and delivering better online and physical experiences.

ROX brings together “soft” investments in organisational culture with “hard” investments in technology and analytics.

ROX also makes it possible to tie CX and EX investments to the outcomes they enable: strong overall business performance, efficient operational execution, and a healthy culture that attracts top talent and yields a positive corporate reputation.

Done right, ROX will spin up a virtuous circle of benefits related to these components — and keep it spinning.

EX in practice

Take an example of a leading hotel chain. Analysis of the previous year’s data has shown that speed of check-in matters a great deal to business travellers. In fact, the data shows that frequency of stay depends on it. Obvious next steps to increase ROX would be to train hotel managers to staff reception adequately and encourage guests to use the chain’s mobile app to ensure that check-in is consistently quick.

It achieves previously unimagined connections between retention rates for frontline employees and the pride they take in knowing they’ve helped get business guests to stay at their facilities time after time

EX Prescription

Three key things;

1. Provide positive touch points at all stages of the employee lifecycle
2. Create a work environment that balances technology, culture and the physical environment
3. Holistically bring together HR functions to build bridges between EX and CX

What Next?

Ask yourself this question… what one thing can I do from tomorrow to generate an exceptional level of engagement, excitement, buy in, loyalty, retention and employer brand loyalty?

Final word

Serve employees well and they then deliver an exceptional CX – ignore them or treat them like disposable commoditised assets and it won’t be just them that suffers, your CX will too.