.
In today’s turbulent marketplace, there’s a lot of emphasis on customer experience.
But is that emphasis coming at the expense of the employee experience?
Think about the frequent reports of dissatisfied workers at Amazon. And what about threatened strikes by pilots and other employees at several major airlines?
Among the lessons learned (or at least available to those who are willing to learn) is that both the employee experience and the customer experience must be mindfully managed—simultaneously and from the top down.
That’s the view of Tiffani Bova, Global Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, a leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications. Her new book is The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth. It’s based on exclusive research from two Salesforce studies of thousands of employees and c-suite executives around the globe.
Bova says the fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get your employees to love their jobs.
What are the warning signs when a company is prioritizing the customer experience at the expense of the employee experience?
“When I meet with executives and dig into the idea that a great customer experience [CX] starts with a great employee experience [EX], I begin by asking what metrics are currently in place to track CX and whether they are tied to executive compensation,” Bova says. “Then I ask the same for EX. That’s where the discussion starts to get interesting”
Bova says the majority of executives admit that while someone owns CX internally, there is typically no role focused on the employee experience. While it’s true that human resources manages pieces of EX, the reality is that 74% of the c-suite say that no one actually “owns” EX. Although many companies have survey and employment data collected over time, a full 73% of the c-suite report they don’t know how to use that data to drive change internally.
“To be clear,” Bova says, “this isn’t about creating a new role to own EX. It’s about eliminating the crisis of prioritization between the customer and employees.”
Tiffani Bova
There’s little doubt that if you want happy customers you must have happy employees. So why did so many leaders seem to miss the memo?
Bova says that while many companies are clear on the importance of seamless customer experience and its impact on growth, “the role employee experience plays has yet to be fully quantified or understood. This is often because leaders feel they can focus on only one stakeholder or the other: customers or employees. That misperception prevents companies from realizing that when EX and CX are improved in concert, the impact on growth will substantially exceed the effect of improving either one at the expense of the other.”
There has been little empirical data to determine which aspects of the employee experience have the greatest impact on customer experience, Bova says. “Without that, many leaders don’t know where to begin. And no matter how much lip service they give to the importance of their employees, they remain stuck between intention and action.”
What does Bova see as the telltale signs of a healthy, engaged, and productive workforce?
“Let me start by sharing the opposite of a healthy, engaged, and productive workforce. The estimated cost of ‘disengaged employees’ to the global economy is $7.8 trillion dollars in lost productivity each year. This disengagement shows up in places like a disinterest in collaboration and an unwillingness to go above and beyond or take on extra work.” She says that more directly, lack of engagement means employees are less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes “no matter how many motivational posters you have on the wall or town hall meetings you schedule. They are more likely to quit or be fired due to poor performance. All of this further exacerbates the talent crunch so many are facing. If you don’t have great employee engagement, how could you possibly expect to see high productivity, innovation, resiliency and organizational agility, let alone happy customers?”
Bova says the telltale signs of a highly engaged workforce manifest themselves in many ways:
- Is there strong cross-functional collaboration?
- Are projects completed on time and within budget?
- Do employees sign up for stretch projects?
- Are new hires coming from internal referrals?
- Does your company make any ‘best place to work’ lists?
- Are you developing talent and promoting from within?
She says the answers to questions like these will start to paint a much clearer picture of the health of a workforce. “If you don’t know the answers to those questions,” she says, “how can you even begin to uncover opportunities for improvement?”
To help foster a supportive culture, how can leaders create cascading sponsorship for and adoption of an experience mindset?
As the old adage goes, Bova says, “culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
She says that even with the best strategic plan in place, a company will never change its approach to a more balanced employee and customer experience unless the company culture supports this shift. “This is not about a new leadership role, or headcount and budget reallocation,” she says. “It’s reframing the operating philosophy of the entire organization. If there’s a decision to improve something for the customer, what are the implications, unintentional or otherwise, to employees and vice-versa?”
Bova says culture is the number one driver of good EX and good CX because it sets the tone for how a company operates during those moments that matter—when an employee engages with a customer in some way.
“While a great culture accentuates positive behaviors and traits that lead to improved performance, a dysfunctional one encourages qualities that hinder even the most successful organizations,” she says. “Fostering a culture that supports its employees across all aspects of their day-to-day experiences must start at the top and be reinforced by everyone.”
In today’s marketplace, what are a couple of outstanding examples of companies doing a great job with the customer experience and employee experience balance? Many people cite consumer companies like Amazon, Nordstrom, the Ritz-Carlton and perhaps a small local establishment they frequent.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Bova says the real conversation begins when she asks executives if they think their company would be regarded as best-in-class by any of their customers.
Big brands like IKEA, FedEx, Apple, Costco and Unilever get a lot of attention for their ability to deliver both strong CX and EX. Bova points out that there are also companies that blossomed in the digital economy—Salesforce, Airbnb, Zappos, Spotify, Pinterest, E-Trade, Etsy—"that have managed to use strong EX as a recruitment and retention tool and strong CX as a word-of-mouth, loyalty and share of wallet indicator.”
The challenge, she says, “is being able not only to get it right every once in a while, or within a division or region, but to get it right consistently when times are good and especially when they are more challenging.”
Bova talks about what she calls “the Great Reflection” brought on by the Covid pandemic and how it affected people’s expectations regarding their work experience.
“I was never a fan of the term the ‘Great Resignation,’ as I felt like it was a negative representation of what transpired,” she says. “In my view, many employees were faced with a once-in-a-career circumstance that challenged every part of their day-to-day work. We spend over a third of our lives working, and in the wake of the pandemic, people realized that work is not where you sit, but rather what you do. And many didn’t want to go back to the how and where of the past, including the employers they worked for.”
The resulting Great Reflection, she says, was the beginning of a reckoning. Today’s employees demand more from employers, and they have proven a willingness to change jobs—and change them often—if they don’t get what they are looking for. And make no mistake, this will continue if companies don’t recognize and embrace the power shift taking place from employer to employee.
So, what seems to be the formula for superior employee experience?
Bova says employee experience is no more or less than the sum of every employer-employee, employee-employee, and employee-customer interaction.
.
“To win at EX,” she says, “you should aim for positive, seamless interactions with and for your employees every chance you get. If you don’t give EX the attention and focus it deserves, you’ll find yourself facing not only a talent shortage but also an absence of growth.”
To deliver best-in-class EX, she says, a company’s approach must be efficient, personalized, predictive, proactive, flexible, responsive, and value-based.
But there’s no single formula for companies to follow. “So much has to do with where a company is today in its EX journey,” he says. “Once that’s understood, companies can begin to fill in the gaps where there’s a need for improvement. Until then, executives are doing what they think is needed versus what employees actually need and value.”
Bova advises that whatever leaders do, they should start with asking their employees what “superior employee experience” means to them, not the leaders. Then they can start working on the formula to fix it.
How does world-class employee experience drive industry-leading customer experience?
Employees carry the torch every day for the values and mission of their company, Bova says.
- They are the face and voice to the company’s customers.
- They design the company’s products and packaging.
- They write the company’s how-to manuals and FAQs.
- They answer the company’s phones and solve complex customer problems.
- They open the company’s stores and stock the company’s shelves.
“You’re kidding yourself if you think that customers don’t notice when your employees aren’t happy at their jobs,” Bova says. “If you have unhappy, disengaged employees, how can you expect them to show up with a smile on their faces and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done?
But the opposite is true as well, she says. “When your employees are engaged and enabled to do their best work, customers notice and respond with their money and loyalty.”
