Customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) have traditionally been looked at as two separate, but essential functions of a business, but should they be? asks Sreelesh Pillai, Freshworks General Manager of Australia.
According to the Harvard Business Review, when CX and EX are managed together, they create a unique, sustainable competitive advantage. Understanding the importance of this connection isn’t enough though. Businesses need to actively and seamlessly merge their CX and EX efforts, otherwise, no real benefit is achieved.
The difficulty that many face, however, is figuring out how to engineer this merge and create a lasting impact on behaviour across the business. Here are four steps that will help business onwers make that leap and achieve a seamless experience.
Defining the purpose and vision of the business
The first step is to clearly define and promote your business purpose. If this isn’t done – either internally to employees, externally to customers or both – issues are bound to arise.
The need for purpose is a strong bond that employees and customers share. Without this, customers will fail to connect, and employees will lack direction and motivation. When there’s a genuine belief in, and shared pursuit of, the same purpose, these relationships will strengthen.
For example, at Freshworks, our motto is to “create delightful experiences for customers and employees alike”. By having this organisational purpose that applies to both employees and customers, we aim to have a shared goal for all, boosting motivation and strengthening teams across the board. Ultimately, it’s about answering the customer’s question of “why should I care?” and the employee’s question of “why am I here?”.
Provide alignment through leadership
Customer and employee experience are concepts that have existed for some time and are widely proven to drive loyalty and profitability. Managing the intersection of the two, on the other hand, is still emerging. Having said that, change rarely happens without it being from the top down. An effective way to drive change forward is to empower and educate the leadership of the organisation – to make those who are capable of change willing and ready to do so with new goals and accountability.
This could come in the form of a big change like implementing a new role such as a Chief Experience Officer or VP of Customer and Employee Experience. Alternatively, it could be something simpler like having CX leaders more involved in employee engagement. The bottom line is that CX/EX alignment needs greater priority within organisations, and leadership can be an important driving force.
Leverage other organisational priorities to move the agenda forward
If your business isn’t quite ready to install a Chief Experience Officer at the executive table, it doesn’t mean you have to give up on making progress towards incorporating CX/EX alignment. Instead, look for opportunities to leverage existing challenges in your organisation to insert a focus on the experience agenda.
Organisations, including mine, are always looking to make progress on initiatives like diversity and inclusion which goes beyond hiring and must permeate all functions of an organisation. From sales to engineering, marketing and customer success, equity and inclusion is critical to the positive experience with Freshworks, how we build our product for them, how we sell to them, and continue to grow with them. .
In the context of all this, leaders can raise awareness of and set expectations that integrated CX and EX perspectives need to be incorporated. This more initiative-level effort introduces a way to build momentum and share the value of integrated experiences for employees and customers and pave the way for wider adoption in the enterprise.
Give employees the tools needed to get the job done
Employees and customers both desire seamless, connected, and personalised communication and collaboration experiences. Customers, for example, want a variety of communication channels for interacting with brands, with the right information available to them at the right time, across any device.
Employees are no different. They want to use communication and collaboration tools to get the job done as efficiently and effectively as possible. It’s about giving them the tools needed to achieve their full potential and drive business value; so ensuring you’ve integrated the right software into business systems is key, whether it be full packages like Freshworks CRM, or individual applications like Freshdesk.
Ultimately, leaders need to encourage teams to experiment and understand which levers of CX and EX result in lasting business impact. Because there’s no blueprint for this work, as leaders you need to lean into this new way of learning by signaling that experimentation is a positive and that learning from unexpected outcomes is valuable. Research from Accenture shows that companies that get CX right increase profitability by 11 per cent, yet those who also get EX right see an increase of 21 per cent. While the concept of merging CX and EX together.
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