While I agree with that definition, I believe it to be missing a critical foundational piece: The organization's internal priorities. An organization's employees' experience day in and day out undoubtedly affects the interactions an organization has with its customers. Accordingly, employees and their behaviors and feelings are equally, if not more influential, and always need to be weighed.
Employee experience (EX) is just as necessary as the customer experience (CX), and it has been argued that an exceptional CX cannot thrive without a stellar EX. The best CX companies in the world believe that to treat their customers exceptionally, they must first make sure their employees are happy and satisfied.
This topic is complicated in understanding and execution. Delivering an excellent EX includes constant communication, HR support, training, leadership, trust, and a conducive environment. Think about all the interactions that you go through every day — some with excitement and others begrudgingly — but the balance makes employees tip one way or another. A seesaw of sorts: the more positive or negative experiences an employee has is correlated to the experience they give their customers.
As leaders, we need to stop and ask a few questions:
- When we build a strategy, are we thinking about our customer-facing employees and how it impacts their job/experience?
- Are we providing the proper training and tools to our employees?
- Do we stop and listen to our employees?
- How are we driving the culture that supports the customer experience we want to deliver?
Take the time to stop and talk to your employees. I recently spoke to an employee who loved her company, loved her co-workers, and loved the product she supported. What was missing was the right culture to support her and her work. She wasn't engaged in building the process to sign someone up for the product – and it was painstaking. Her approach was full of physical paperwork, follow-up phone calls, and frustrated clients. The product was superior in the marketplace compared to the competition. Still, the time it took to sign clients up for the service made it so inefficient the service could not be promoted or sold at a profitable margin. It was clear that her management did not ask the questions above.
We can all do better, starting with changing how we embrace our employees from the inception of our strategies to listening to our employees often. In my opinion, Sir Richard Branson got it right in the simplest of terms: "Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients."