Why is Employee Experience as Important as Customer Experience

Organization’s success heavily relies on its relationships with its customers and employees.

Businesses globally are evolving tremendously and becoming more sophisticated. The global market is adopting a service-based industry model because of the surge in Everything-as-a-Service (EaaS). Hence, business leaders must balance employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) to ensure success.

Enterprises giving equal priority to both EX and CX will have higher employee engagement. It will also help the organization get a competitive edge. A recent report by Salesforce titled “customer engagement research” shows that 73% of people expect brands to understand their needs and expectations. Most employees today expect this personal touch too.

It is challenging for many business leaders to find the connection between customer experience and employee experience. Offering the best products and services without a cohesive and happy workforce will be a challenging task.

Enterprises with poor EX will have a tremendous impact on customer journeys. Because until and unless the crew is happy and satisfied, they won’t be able to feel motivated to work. Employee experience and customer experience are directly proportional, and the impact on one can have disastrous implications for the other.

If enterprises do not consider resignations a wake-up call to focus on EX, businesses will suffer even more because of employee attrition.

Also Read: How Enterprises Can Implement AI Ethics

Reasons Why the Employee Experience is Crucial

A positive customer experience also denotes a positive employee experience because it creates loyalty and engagement. Investing in this area is one of the best things a business can do. According to a report by IBM titled “The Financial Impact of a Positive Employee Experience,” Organizations with a great employee experience see 2x the return on sales and 3x the return on assets.

Businesses that have effective EX strategies will be able to drive innovation and increase productivity tremendously.

“It’s important for business leaders to bring that same positive customer experience strategy to the employee journey. Today, employees crave an employee-centric experience that’s engaging, personalized, convenient, and prioritizes independence,” says Tate Hackert, President and Co-Founder of ZayZoon.

On the contrary, a report by Gartner titled “Employee Experience Insights” suggests that nearly 13% of employees are delighted with their experience. The report also highlights that many businesses are increasing their investments and efforts to enhance the EX.

Organizations will better connect with their employees by considering the employee experience as important as the customer experience. It will also ensure that their most important business asset is handled well.

Strategies to Create Better Alignment Between Employee Experience and Customer Experience

Business leaders who prioritize EX and CX equally can consider the following strategies.

Map Both CX and EX Journeys

Most businesses have their customer journeys mapped right from customer acquisition to retention. Customer journey mapping is one of the most effective ways to understand how clients learned about the brand, which channel they used to discover it, what made them purchase, and their after-sales process.

Mapping the customer experience helps the organization identify the bottlenecks in the customer lifecycle and look for opportunities to overcome them. Business leaders must take the same approach to support employees and empower them. It is crucial to focus on ways job seekers find out about the vacancies and opportunities in the organization.

Moreover, it is also essential to consider how they are trained to feel empowered for success once they are on board. Hence, businesses need to map employee journeys, regarding it as important as mapping customer journeys, to get a holistic view of the employee experience.

Finding the proper connection between EX and CX is crucial for enterprises to ensure happy employees and meet customer expectations. Mapping employee journeys can be challenging for businesses. Business leaders should consider investing in resources and tools that fix internal employee journeys and external customer journeys.

Business decision-makers can implement CX skills to determine employee expectations. It is one of the essential steps to get a holistic view of the employee journeys and gaps in them to achieve goals.

Invest in Technology to Improve Employee Experience

One example is giving control back to employees through technology offerings like self-service portals that manage employee services without waiting for HR teams to answer their questions. Customers prefer options like self-checkout because it’s quicker and more efficient, giving employees independence and convenience as well.

Employees can use self-service portals on their own. It will enable them to access things like on-demand pay benefits to pay bills of everyday expenses and much more.

“But investing in self-service employee engagement platforms and offering personalized benefits will not be sufficient. Our data shows that only 10% of employees use their self-service portal regularly if they’re not required to mainly due to a lack of awareness. New benefits and innovative technology are not valuable unless employees leverage them. So, it’s important to provide clear and concise information on the latest platform integrations or learning and development programs so that employees can better understand the value of new services,” adds Tate Hackert, President and Co-Founder of ZayZoon.

Employers need to enhance the employee experience by personalizing offerings. This will benefit a wide variety of their workforce’s needs and provide them with educational opportunities and financial wellness tools.

Also Read: Four Crucial Ways Hybrid Cloud Can Help boost Customer Experience

Develop a Centralized EX and CX Metric system

A crucial aspect is a relentless focus on and alignment between customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). Business leaders can get inspired by the key performance indicators (KPIs) set to calculate the CX. They can implement similar KPIs like the CX to measure the overall EX. Implementing CX KPIs like Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) will help businesses understand employee satisfaction and engagement.

The KPIs between CX and EX may differ, but as far as the goal is to improve the journeys, it will work wonderfully for many enterprises. Considering employees as internal customers will help businesses to go to great lengths to accomplish their EX goals.

The connection between employee experience and customer experience is directly proportional. Hence modern businesses need to prioritize EX as important as CX to achieve business goals on time.