For years, companies have sought to deliver experiences that their customers will remember. In the experience economy, which is redefining the relationship between the physical world and the digital world, many companies are still struggling to shake up their habits from markets built on historical dogmas, explains Emmanuel Schupp, Avaya France.
Admittedly, they focus, rightly, on customer orientation, the personalization of journeys and the creation of fluid interactions thanks to increasingly sophisticated ergonomics, but what many do not realize is that, in a customer-centric approach, the involvement of employees plays an essential role. Indeed, employee experience is a huge driver of engagement, with research showing that companies with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors significantly. So where to start?
Connecting customer and employee experiences
This can involve setting up employee experience programs which, rather than being based on a transactional approach, focus on the employee journey. This concept begins with careful integration of newcomers into the company. Some companies work on their employer brand and highlight the company’s values when recruiting.
Once employees are well onboarded, the idea is to properly capture and link every important moment of their lifecycle in the company – just as customer experience programs have done for many years for the lifecycle of the customer.
In addition to the appropriate digital tools, it is also necessary to adopt a vision at the level of each employee, by identifying the parts of the customer journey on which an employee can interact. For example, a contact center agent will influence customer experiences during phone interactions.
Similar approaches can be taken for roles such as bank advisors, insurance representatives, field technicians and many more. It’s important here not to fall into the trap of basing the correlation on a particular agent’s overall employee experience level (measured by the employee’s NPS or EX index).
While these metrics can provide some insight, the only way to get enough evidence to make improvements is to drill down into different aspects of the employee experience, not just the overall scores.
A customer engagement program that does not encompass the employee engagement program simply cannot reach its full potential. Creating a common metrics framework and correlating data from customers and collaborators will uncover mutual dependencies – creating the insights essential for success in the experience economy.
Find the right measures by drawing inspiration from the Customer Experience
The implementation of an appropriate KPI logic makes the difference in moving from a simple discourse on the importance of the employee experience to its actual management on a daily basis. A good starting point for deciding what to measure is to take inspiration from the customer experience. Deloitte even suggests creating a common framework for measuring customer and employee experiences (called “stakeholder experience”).
Following this logic, employee experience KPIs should fall into the same categories used to measure customer experience: Ease, Recommendations, and Satisfaction. The exact nature of the metrics will depend on the nature of the business, but categorizing them into these three categories will provide a complete picture of the employee experience, from effort and emotion to overall relationships and risk of attrition.
Like the customer journey, the employee journey is made up of many “touch points”: hiring, initial and regular training, post-training support, daily work, coaching, performance improvement plans, recognition, promotion, etc The experience at each of these touchpoints should be actively measured and analyzed, with the goal of making improvements whenever possible. And when the company assesses the influence of improvements, it should always focus on employee perception, not business intent – because the two can differ significantly.
While the global economy is experiencing unprecedented upheavals, the notion of employee experience built in symmetry with the notion of customer experience has become a priority for companies to overcome the obstacles that will arise in the coming years.