What is Employee Experience (EX)?
There are various layers to Employee Experience (EX), end-to-end journey’s considering first contact, interviewing, contract, first day, salary discussion, etc. Whilst all of high value and importance, the focus of our collective Customer Experience (CX) work focuses on one or two parts of a larger employee experience. Parking key elements like culture and physical space to one side, we predominantly focus on technology and/or systems that enable employees to best serve the customer. Ultimately a company/brand is made up of product, process and people. Here, we are talking about the process for people in relation to a customer’s experience, and this means tech.
Technology and EX
Often whilst designing and employing systems and processes to present best practice buying or engagement opportunities in the user journey for customers, employees working these personalised experiences are neglected. Employees are under pressure to perform and measure and improve customer experience and without the tools to do so face a near-impossible task.
Employees rate the following as the most important (VMWare Survey 2019 – 6,500 respondents):
- Being able to add all applications on work and own devices
- Being trained from day one
- Being able to work on applications remotely
- Being able to work across various devices – i.e. smartphone/tablet
Deloitte’s 2019 employee experience survey detailed that 62% of employees are not satisfied that they have the technology applications to do their job properly. Their perception vs reality might be lack of onboarding (not knowing they have access) but there is enough evidence to suggest IT is either limited in its ability to provide systems but also does not know what is best to provide. This continuing circle is fired by risk analysts, cybersecurity and potential expensive purchases to place within a company’s tenancy/IT set up. So, how do you come up with the right tools?
The steps to consider:
- What works best for customer engagement
- The system provider for the customer engagement tool might advise the best CRM, or CMS, or engagement platform and potential APIs to connect
- Establish the pitfalls of certain scenarios and what provides the best balance to allow employees to service the customer
- Survey marketing staff who might know what they require to service the customer best
- Assess with IT the potential issues or timeline to attach APIs, etc to execute then train staff
- Beta test, report back and go live when issues are ironed out.
It’s important to continually update and meet with IT and marketing staff to establish performance and engage all with a culture of continual improvement. If customers would be better served by a certain system improvement or that employees could be more efficient then ensure the process is performed again.
Strategy and the actions associated need a holistic approach. Whilst Customer Experience is critical, if creative UX, brand CX and EX are not aligned then the customer loses out. If employees cannot manage the personalised experience for the customer then it is a touchpoint miss managed, a user miss directed to a product not appropriate and a brand’s value damaged. Ultimately not a sale, not an engagement, a loss of an upsell and hard work ahead to win back that potential customer.
Read the first blog in this series here.