Any business owner will know that their customer’s experience is the most important factor in deciding their overall success. For some business owners, this translates into the customer experience being the be-all and end-all of their efforts, but smarter entrepreneurs and leaders will realize the pitfalls of this. Among other things, overfocus on customer experience can lead to ignoring employee experience; and in the long run this can mean that unhappy employees harm the very thing you’ve been trying to protect. In short, without happy employees, you’re not going to have happy customers.
Building a strong workplace culture
It’s a long shot that you’ll ever have a team of employees that come to work and high-five one another while reciting company slogans. It’s also probably not desirable, seeming a little cultish. But you can certainly aim for a happy workforce that is prepared to go the extra mile by ensuring a supportive workplace. Recognizing employees’ achievements and harnessing their individual skills aids job satisfaction and means that they will seek one another out for assistance and support. If an employee feels that they have a say in the business, they’ll make greater efforts for customers too.
Using tools and technology to empower employees
If an employee feels like they aren’t constantly running into blind alleys to get their job done, their work day will feel more rewarding. Imagine for a moment you turn up at work to start at 8am, with lunch at midday. If you reach that point in the day and have spent four hours troubleshooting, apologizing and waiting for assistance, your mood will likely be low. Using innovative tools for feedback, scheduling and other infrastructural elements like merchant services means things will go smoothly and employees can focus on actually helping customers, benefiting both sides of the equation.
Supportive leadership
Probably most of us have been in a job where we didn’t feel supported, and it’s not conducive to doing a good job. If you feel like you’ve been cut loose to do your job alone, and can’t rely on support from leaders within the business, you’re not going to do much more than the bare minimum. Who would go the extra mile to help a customer if they didn’t feel that they were empowered by a manager or team leader who had their back? That sense of isolation flows downhill; if employees feel supported, they’ll pay that positivity on to customers. If they don’t, they won’t.
Measuring success
Some targets for employees are necessary. Doing a good job does, in the end, come back to statistics and so it’s important to measure how your employees are performing. There needs to be balance, though. As well as tracking key performance indicators for employees like any business, it is also fundamental to look at things that show how well the business is performing. Employee retention is one such statistic.
You should also be looking at customer satisfaction scores and checking those against who those customers have interacted with. A satisfied customer will put more money into the business, and recognizing the employees who have helped that happen creates a virtuous circle where you retain more happy customers, and employees are more invested in keeping that ecosystem operating smoothly.
The future of employee experience and customer experience
It’s clear that employee happiness and that of your customers are innately tied. As technology develops, there are increasing opportunities to harness that link. AI-enhanced chatbots and predictive analytics allow employees to deliver customer service more promptly and in a more personalized way, reducing repetitive tasks while also allowing the process to be more individualized. It’s often underestimated just how bad for morale it can be – on all sides – for an employee to ask a customer to repeat their problem for what might be the third or fourth time, and become a target for an understandably frustrated response.
Along with hybrid working models and immersive training which is increasingly making use of virtual reality, companies are able to strengthen that link between employee and customer experience, and for all three stakeholders to see the benefits of this integration.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer that employees, customers and the bottom line of a business are not competing priorities. It’s not a choice between pleasing the employee and pleasing the customer; doing both is possible and, increasingly, is the only way to run a successful business. Prioritizing people – whichever end of the phone or email chain they are on – is how effective business leaders will stand out from the crowd both now and in the future.
