To ruin the customer experience, it only takes one…
Some time ago I was switching between two cars of a prestigious German brand. I’m a big and loyal fan for more than 20 years now, also due to their great customer experience. So I turned in the old car at the official dealership and drove home in the new one, happy as a child at Christmas…
A few weeks later, I still get billed for the rent of the old car. I’m confident that this is just an innocent mistake. But as I call the company, I’m confronted with an employee insisting that I didn’t turn in my old car. Quite absurd of course, but nevertheless, the employee keeps on insisting that I’m still in possession my old car, despite all the facts and documents proving the opposite. The reality was that the intake process had not been fully respected at the dealership. This resulted in a tiny single check box remaining “open” in the employee’s computer.
You would expect that this little detail could be solved in a second. After all, everything was obviously ok. But no, there was only one solution: turn in the car again, scrupulously following the official process, so the check box could finally be ticked. You can imagine how disappointed I was by this quite kafkaesque customer experience. It took several weeks, calls and mails before the manager of the department realised what was happening and finally arranged things.
This story is rather anecdotic, but it’s a good illustration of how an inadequate employee experience can ruin the customer experience. You must realise that, like this major company, you can spend millions of euros and tons of energy on building a nice customer experience. But at the end of the day, it only takes one single employee to ruin everything.
So, the rule is very simple: if you want to create a sustainable customer experience, make sure that every employee is aware of his or her essential contribution to the customer experience. As we illustrated in a previous article, more employees are getting deeply involved in the customer experience.
Secondly, if you expect your employees to contribute actively to the customer experience, make sure you empower them to do so. In this little anecdote, it would have been easy to blame the employee. But maybe he or she has been told to “never, never deviate from the process”, even if forcing the respect of the process would ruin the customer experience. Which was thoroughly applied in my case ;-).
Again, we can easily make the link between customer experience and employee experience:
If you want to create a sustainable delighting customer experience, you must make sure your employees are aware of their essential role in creating and maintaining the customer experience.
On top of that, you must make sure they are enabled and empowered to give priority to the customer experience at any time.
No employee experience, no customer experience
More and more companies are rushing into improving their customer experience. But who's delivering this experience to your customers? The quality of your products or services? Yes! The quality of your communication with your customers? Yes! Your co-workers? Yes, again! Not only because employees are the main driver behind the quality of your products, services and customer communications. But also because, more than ever before, more employees have direct interactions with the final customer. So it seems rather obvious that focussing on customer experience without creating the right employee experience would not make a lot of sense.
The influence of digital and organisational evolution
In today's world, the success of your company is generated by the interactions between your employees and your customers, facilitated by tools and processes. This was already the case yesterday, but some things have fundamentally changed:
digital has multiplied the different touch points between your customer and your company, meaning also the number of employees involved in these touch points;
digital is pushing the traditional front-end and back-end applications into each other, becoming something like shared platforms, creating an end-to-end visibility of the interactions in these applications to both customers and co-workers;
organisations are getting flatter, leaner, giving more responsibilities to co-workers, meaning more of them are involved in a direct customer contact and customer experience.
In other words, the number of touch points and the surface of connection between your customers and your co-workers have both considerably increased. This being considered, it seems rather obvious that a great customer experience cannot be delivered without a great employee experience. The one goes with the other.
The methods for employee experience are not very different from customer experience
There are several methods which have been developed for the design of customer experience that can be very useful in working on your employee experience. Just as with customer experience, you can develop the proper employee experience by:
working with employee personas to have a vivid and realistic representation of the most significant employee groups;
mapping the employee journey to understand how it works and what the main moments of truth are;
listen to employees and incorporate their feedback into experience and process improvements.
Who's in charge of employee experience?
Now that we know how important it is to focus on employee experience with at least the same attention as your efforts for customer experience, the question is to know how you will cope with this in your organisation. Number of companies have already designated a "chief customer experience officer", but how many have designated a "chief employee experience officer"? Some have made a first effort by designating a "chief happiness officer", but we are not sure this will put the right focus on what is really important, namely the "delivery" of the interactions between customers and co-workers. Defining the right span of both and how they meet in the core of business is one of the main challenges.
As a conclusion, it is safe to say that building a strong customer experience is inseparable from a strong employee experience. Therefor it is important to formalise the responsibility for employee experience in the organisation, while proven methods from the customer experience development can be very helpful in designing your employee experience.