How the Employee Experience Determines a Customer Experience

If you think you can aim to please the customer without first aiming to please your people, you’re thinking amiss. And it’s going to catch up with you if it hasn’t already. The fact is that you can draw a direct line between customer experience (CX) and employee experience. It’s true: happy employees make happy customers. I mean, haven’t you vowed never to return to a restaurant where the food was great, but the wait person was a piece of work? Most of us have.

Here’s how the employee experience determines a customer experience – and more.

The Issue

If enterprises want a better customer experience and corresponding ROI, they need to concentrate on the employee experience. While the two experiences are duly intertwined, they’re also separate, in that it generally takes a happy workforce to produce happy customers. Why? For one thing, happy employees tend to go out of their way for customers and give them their all. And because they’re happy, they tend to stick around, while learning new skills. That, too, benefits the company, and ultimately the customer.

What is Employee Experience?

Employee experience is a snapshot of what employees encounter and observe during their tenure at a company, from recruitment to exit.

What is Customer Experience?

Ultimately, customer experience comes down to how a customer perceives your brand. It’s the impression customers have of your brand throughout the customer’s entire buying journey.

Why is the Customer Experience Important?

Simply put, customer experience is everything. It’s vital for any business’s sustained growth. If too many customers have bad experiences, you won’t have much of a business. The good news is that the opposite is also true: lots of happy customers will equal nice profits.

Indeed, a positive customer experience does wonders for customer loyalty, and will get said employees to spread the word about you.

Why is the Employee Experience Important?

The pandemic has caused businesses to rethink how they do things, including how they view the employee experience — and there’s no end in sight. Employees these days have more of the upper hand, so how they feel about a company is key to recruitment, motivation, and retention, and ultimately, the organization’s bottom line. Their experience is also key to the CX, as we’ve established.

How Can I Improve the Employee Experience?

One of the main ways is to increase engagement. After all, studies have indicated that organizations with great CX have staffers that are 1.5 times more engaged than employees at companies with lower-rated such experiences. What’s more, organizations that have highly engaged workers outperform their rivals by 147%.

It’s also important to – beyond pay and benefits – invest in each employee’s personal and professional development. Doing so promotes a workforce that feels trusted, valued, and respected.

Organizations must also get regular feedback from employees so that they know what they’re thinking about the company and how they feel. Surveys are a popular way to obtain such insight, which can drive strategic decisions that can also come back around to an improved employee experience. However, the surveys must be more frequent than those annual ones that you conduct each year and rarely do anything about.

Now that you know how the employee experience determines a customer experience, you can take a more holistic view when making strategic plans. As you’ve seen, it all comes down to the employee experience. If you focus on that – getting help from a consultant such as Mercer – you can’t help but have satisfied customers. And you’ll be happier than ever with your bottom line.