Capgemini + Microsoft — delivering powerful employee experiences to delight customers
The experience customers receive from a brand is often a good reflection of the brand’s employee experience (EX) — and gives an accurate indication of how strongly their staff believes in the company’s mission and values. If organizations can inspire their employees — empowering them with the right tools and data to work more collaboratively, efficiently, and effectively and create a more appealing workplace through immersive capabilities — they’ll be well equipped and more willing to ensure that customers are also happy.
Against the backdrop of the pandemic, the challenges around employee recruitment and retention, and now the continuous rise in the cost of living, both employees and customers are looking for more simplicity and peace of mind on how they engage with brands to better cope with life’s stresses.
Although there’s usually more emphasis placed on CX than EX, the latter must come before the former. If brands don’t prioritize in-house changes, they’ll never see the full potential of what their customers could experience. The stats prove it. Organizations with excellent EX are:
- 2.4x more likely to delight customers
- 2.2x more likely to exceed financial targets
- 4.3x more likely to innovate effectively
Source: Josh Bersin, The Definitive Guide: Employee Experience (2021)
How Microsoft technology can transform the face of employee experience
To ensure employees stay happy — and serve customers better — organizations should construct an environment with the right conditions in which employees can develop their talents. Microsoft’s pedigree in user-focused innovations and products help make this a reality by revolutionizing seven key work-related areas:
Training. Microsoft’s Hololens 2 headset allows users to place holograms, images, and videos in their physical field of view and interact with them through mixed reality technology. Not only does it spice up dull training sessions, but it can reduce overall training time and improve safety and knowledge retention.
Well-being. Viva Insights, part of the Microsoft employee experience platform, provides features that help bring out the best in employees while keeping a pulse on their personal health and wellness (e.g., alerts on when it’s time for a break, suggestions on how to avoid burnout and stress, and actions that could improve work culture and affect business outcomes).
Fluid collaboration. Here’s a small taste of how Microsoft is helping boost productivity:
- Teams, with over 270 million monthly active users, is the “single pane of glass” for collaboration with people around data and processes.
- Viva Connections, embedded in Teams, removes obstacles to information flow. It keeps employees up to date with the latest company news, events, and conversations, while access to shareable resources inspires more collaboration and learning.
- Viva Sales, an add-on that integrates with the Microsoft 365 suite and syncs with any CRM, reduces admin tasks for salespeople, and provides AI-driven customer insights that can move sales forward fast. It also encourages knowledge-sharing among colleagues and makes extracting valuable information from meetings and emails easy and intuitive.
- AltspaceVR is a metaverse platform bringing people together through live virtual events, concerts, conferences, town halls, or simple collaboration sessions. It can also enliven employee onboarding processes. Employees can create their own avatars and experience spatial sound while immersed in a virtual environment.
Knowledge scenarios. SharePoint Syntex, an advanced AI-driven service, can unlock key information from various types of company documents. It automatically classifies them, then extracts requested information using user-defined models based on structured, semi-structured, or unstructured document types. It’s an essential helper tool that eliminates the grueling manual labor of going through countless documents to identify pertinent data. It empowers employees and allows them to switch to more meaningful tasks.
Field service support. Remote Assist connects people with remote experts. Through a mobile or Hololens 2, real-time views can easily be shared to troubleshoot and repair critical components fast. In addition to the sustainability benefits, employees can acquire new skills through hands-on experience while companies enjoy shorter downtime, keeping operations running smoothly. Guides also provide augmented reality tips and information to resolve issues quickly the first time.
Optimization. Azure Digital Twins can be used to create multiple, connected digital models of real-life objects and assets augmented with IoT data. It provides the ability to simulate different scenarios on the modeled environments to discover which of them could be replicated in the physical world. The try-before-you-build approach saves on money and resources, but it also helps address customer needs to deliver exactly the kind of experiences they want.
Innovation. Employees want to innovate and solve problems to make a difference. Microsoft’s Power Platform can empower them to create useful, inventive products and services using low-code application development to harness enterprise data. With little to no programming experience required, employees can dive right in and start making changes that positively impact their workplace and, in turn, customers.
How employees feel and perform in their workplace either directly or indirectly affects what customers feel when they interact with the brand. That’s why it’s imperative not to forget about improving EX when CX conversations begin with clients.
Partnerships: our biggest assets
Capgemini’s 20-year-long relationship with Microsoft is a special one that has yielded many solutions for our clients thanks to the combination of Microsoft’s leading technologies and our transformation and technical capabilities. But even as our current partnerships evolve, we’re building new ones to ensure future client challenges can be quickly overcome. Given the growing popularity and opportunity with 3D experiences, we’ve partnered with Unity to take advantage of the unique opportunities and benefits that immersive experiences can enable in the metaverse and in augmenting scenarios across industrial, automotive, and retail experiences.
Conclusion
Microsoft’s history in employee experience firmly places them as leaders in this domain through decades of investment in hardware, software, and a platform that delivers across the needs of customers and employees alike. Microsoft’s success in gaming and a portfolio of virtual worlds such as Minecraft and Forza position them well for an exciting future where virtual and physical worlds merge to deliver across the expanse of customer and employee experiences.
To find out about how Capgemini can transform your customer and employee experience visit us here.
Thanks to Shirish Borkar and Daniel Rentel for inputs and edits.
