A lot of companies overlook the fact that a great employee experience leads to a great customer experience. Independently, each discipline leads to valuable relationships — with customers and employees — but when Customer Experience and Employee Experience are managed together, they create a unique, sustainable competitive advantage. To do this, companies should consider integrating the two disciplines and installing a Chief Experience Officer to lead the combined effort across the entire organization.
CX has become the new marketing. It influences brand perceptions and impacts business performance just as strongly as traditional marketing such as media advertising and price promotions once did. A good customer experience makes a person five times more likely to recommend a company and more likely to purchase in the future.
But the customer is only one half of the experience equation. The employee experience is similarly important, and it can often go overlooked. EX — the sum of all interactions an employee has with an organization, from recruiting to an exit interview – also significantly impacting business performance. EX involves far more than human resources functions, including facilities, internal communications, IT, and even corporate social responsibility.
The vital link between customers and employees and causes the need for companies to attend to experience holistically. Companies that emphasize EX over CX could end up with well-meaning employees who have no idea how to serve customers — or employees who are happy and satisfied but don’t produce the right results. And companies that focus on CX without attending to EX could struggle with labor costs due to high employee turnover and a lack of creative thinking. Or a leader could wake up to find her company in the news because a disgruntled employee decided to post a video about the horrible working conditions they have to endure. Companies that deliver considerably above average on their customer experience are five times more likely to earn “good” or “very good” employee engagement ratings than companies that deliver average or below average.
Skillful leadership that integrates and aligns the customer and employee experiences is at executive level. That is where a Chief Experience Officer (CXO) comes in, someone responsible for CX and EX who helps an organization develop and unleash the combined power of both disciplines. A Chief Experience Officer deepens how employees understand customers and how company leaders understand employees, centralizing the value in its people-centered functions.
Some companies have installed a CXO to drive customer experience, but a true “experience officer” should head up both the CX and EX functions and be responsible for creating a mutually reinforcing link between the two. Therefore, the CXO role referred to here leads the experience effort for customers and employees.
If an organization separates leadership of CX from EX, disconnects between CX and EX are likely to arise, even if those roles are part of the executive team. The fact is, employees can and will only deliver experiences to customers that they experience themselves. If a company wants to deliver a tech-enabled, seamless, and intuitive CX, for example, it’s not going to get there if everything it does with employees is on paper, slow, and bureaucratic. But when CX and EX are aligned, however, and employees experience firsthand the desired CX, they learn how it makes them feel, how valuable it can be, and how they can start making it happen through their own actions and decisions.
Moreover, separating the CX and EX functions leads to competition between the two for resources and attention. That’s an unfortunate, but expected, outcome. Integrating them into a single department, or at least uniting the two departments with a single leader, lets companies take advantage of synergies between the two. A customer journey mapping tool can be applied to EX design; an internal communications platform can be linked to customer care platform; an employee development program can be deployed to increase customer knowledge and understanding, thereby upskilling the workforce while increasing its CX capacity.
A CXO who leads the company to become more customer- and employee-centered is responsible for:
- Increasing the understanding of customers among all employees
- Increasing the understanding of employees among company leaders
- Driving deliberate, disciplined design and delivery of experiences to customers and employees
- Creating connections between CX and EX, and advocating for the integration they require, whether technical or otherwise
- Championing customers’ and employees’ perspectives in the company’s strategic decision-making
- Measuring the impact of CX on employees, the impact of EX on customers, and the impact of both on the company’s KPIs
Elements that comprise customer and employee relationships: attraction, engagement/retention, and development. To facilitate engagement, an organization / CXO might set up listening stations, where employees could go either online or physically to hear from customers directly and learn about their successes and challenges. This increases employee engagement by helping them understand customers better, but with that understanding, employees develop tools and solutions that better meet customers’ needs, thus ultimately increasing customer engagement.
By integrating and aligning CX and EX with a single CXO role, a company centralizes the value in its people-centered functions— people outside the company (customers) and people inside (employees).