“Customers of our customers benefit, and get better service, from more engaged employees.” This came from Emmett Johnson, our Director of Sales at Snowfly, and shows you how we think internally. You can see how how Employee Experience (EX) has a real, significant impact on Customer Experience (CX).
Emmett loves talking to people who want to create a better culture… one where employees love to come to work (which is what employee experience (EX) is), and have measurable improvements in employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and employee performance.
But more than just improving organizational culture, Emmett is keenly interested in the success of your organization, and that happens when your customers benefit.
Emmett was talking about this with our team and our CEO responded with this: “If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.”
Employee Experience (EX) Has a Direct Impact on Customer Experience (CX)
You can see that, at Snowfly, we are focused on the many moving parts that make up your success. Having customers, and having happy customers, is a big part of that. When we onboard new clients we talk about the important metrics they want to improve. Almost always this involves conversations around customers (retention, increased customer satisfaction scores, etc.).
Taking care of customers (Customer Experience (CX)) can only happen once you have a foundation made up of productive, happy, and invested employees (Employee Experience (EX)). There is no chicken/egg thing going on here: without the right team, you will erode your customer base. You have to give your employees a better employee experience (EX) in order to give a better customer experience.
In 2017 we talked about the surprising #1 indicator of business success. This was a great blog post written by my colleague. I like how he talks about an article that listed five key metrics for business success in the contact center industry, and said they pretty much missed the point. Sure, those metrics were good. They were important. But the most important metric, for any business, any industry, was turnover.
Turnover higher than it should be is an indicator that something is wrong. You have management or leadership problems, or you pay too far below market rate. Perhaps the work environment is toxic, or there just aren’t opportunities for growth. Turnover is like a canary in the coal mine with regard to employee experience (EX), except this is a very expensive canary. Turnover might be the most important metric you track to ensure your employees, and in turn, your customers, are having the right experiences.
Let’s turn this around… imagine for a second your employees are just plain grumpy. Your CX team, your sales team, your billing team, everyone is just unhappy. It feels like there is a dark cloud in your organization. Do you think those attitudes and feelings will be felt by your customers? Undoubtedly.
When your customers feel that, they either take on those feelings, or they recognize there is a mess going on that they might not want to be involved with.
Flipping that around, again, when your team has excellent (or at least strong and positive) employee experience (EX), your customers can feel that. And they want to be a part of it. It is fun and exciting!
People want to enjoy where they work and who they work with, and that includes working with you, even if you are a vendor or partner.
Want to improve your customer experience? Get real serious about your employee experience (EX). This will be an investment in time and effort that can pay rich dividends for many years to come.
Of course, we’d love to help improve your employee experience (EX) as well as your customer, experience (CX). We do this with gamification, incentives, rewards, recognition, and even voice analytics. Our tools make a difference in customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX)! Reach out to us and let’s get on a call!
