What is the digital employee experience (DEX) of your frontline staff?
In my 20 years at Step Two, I’ve interviewed many hundreds of frontline staff, across a wide range of government and private-sector organisations.
Universally, these staff want to deliver a great level of customer service. Every day, they are taking steps to make the most of the tools and resources they are provided with by their firms, with the clear objective of meeting customer needs.
Many of the stories I’ve heard in frontline environments, however, are troubling.
In call centres, staff are deluged by emails with updates on product and system changes. The systems themselves are often old and complex, and getting required information during a time-pressured customer call is difficult.
In hospitals and aged care homes, staff often lack phones or tablets they need to access real-time information, instead relying on shared PCs, a model that hasn’t changed in 15+ years. Client or patient information is often duplicated across systems, and staff need to be proficient in an extraordinarily large number of disparate systems. In the end, many staff fall back to paper records and sources to get their job done.
It’s no easier for staff on the road. Intranets and knowledge bases can be hard to access via dated IT networks. Staff can feel isolated, and often have to fall back on their personal judgement and experience when making customer-related decisions, due to the lack of support they receive.
Are these small problems?
While frontline staff struggle with many small issues, difficulties and gaps, the resulting impact is large. At an organisational strategy level, this hampers the ability of the business to deliver the customer experience it’s striving for.
These problems also regularly expose firms to significant business and regulatory risks, which are now routinely being uncovered by consumer advocates and social-media-savvy customers.
And when business offerings change, frontline issues act as an anchor that hampers transformation at the most important part of the business: the point of interaction with customers.
While the intricacies of IT network configuration are clearly best left to others, business leaders at all levels should have a good understanding of the real-world experience of frontline staff.
Digital employee experience (DEX) for frontline staff
All of this comes together into a picture of the digital employee experience for frontline staff. This consists of the full set of digital tools, platforms, devices and processes that frontline employees have to hand.
It’s clear that the DEX for many frontline staff isn’t up to scratch. Long stretches of incremental — almost organic — changes to the frontline environment have made the experience into a patchwork of new and old.
In the absence of a vision or strategy for frontline DEX, it’s been difficult to make informed decisions about what to provide to employees, and how. IT departments roll out improvements where they can, but perennially under-invest due to the lack of strategic focus or priorities.
What’s needed is a clear understanding of the frontline experience, and then a coordinated action plan to better support staff who are the face of the business.
Delivering a mobile experience to retail banking staff
Barclays Bank has been an early mover in delivering better solutions to frontline staff. In 2013, it delivered a new mobile app for 20,000 branch staff across the UK retail operation.
This was provided as a BYOD solution, to be used on the personal devices of frontline staff.
The application provided the basic of internal communication updates, internal campaigns, branch locations and the like. It also provided the top 500 knowledge base articles for use by staff who didn’t have access to the intranet.
The MyZone app won a Platinum Intranet and Digital Workplace Award because of its extraordinary business benefits:
22% increase in employee engagement
50% decrease in customer complaints relating to staff knowledge
2% increase in net promoter score
It also increased consumer uptake of digital tools, and saved £1 million. All of this with a relatively simple solution that simply closed the substantial gap in digital experience for frontline staff.
What’s the story?
Business leaders should have a clear picture in their heads of how services are delivered to staff, and what the experience is for the staff who deliver those services.
While it’s the job of managers to dive deep into the details, leaders can quickly obtain a clear understanding in a holistic way, through the use of narrative.
This is typically delivered in one (or all) of three ways:
Personas, that focus on the characteristics and needs of key staff groups; day-in-the-life stories that paint a picture of frequent activities and issues; and journey maps, which explore an end-to-end experience such as onboarding.
These are not difficult to create out of a modest amount of frontline research, featuring time spent with the actual ‘doers’. With these in hand, leaders can engage more effectively with these staff, work more productively with their managers, and make more informed strategic decisions.
(Note that these are exactly the same techniques you’ve seen used in customer experience projects, to great effect.)
Mustering action
Making improvements to frontline DEX will require the active involvement and commitment of multiple areas of the business. At the outset, leaders can direct and energise this action by bringing together these business managers to decide on a coordinated and strategic approach.
Key business areas are likely to include:
Line of business divisions, who are directly responsible for their frontline staff. They can set clear expectations on the desired frontline DEX, as well as allocating ongoing resources to help sustain a great outcome.
IT teams for the relevant business areas, who will typically be responsible for delivering and maintaining frontline business systems, such as CRM, etc. These systems may need the greatest investment, with a focus on integrating systems to provide a more seamless and productive digital employee experience.
Corporate IT, who generally provide the basic infrastructure and access for staff that are crucial for frontline roles. They may also be responsible for the devices that are provided (or not) to frontline staff, as well as for taking a longer-term view of overall IT architecture.
Human resources and payroll, who deliver key services for all employees, such as pay and leave. They will also be responsible for providing the intranet sites or apps that frontline staff use (or again, can’t use) for these common services.
Internal communications, who produce and disseminate corporate news, as well as providing local communication activities, either directly or in a supporting role. This may include operational updates which are crucial for frontline roles (or this may be managed by the line of business units themselves).
Making a start
Like the process of improving customer experience, improving frontline DEX will be a multi-streamed, multi-year process. But like CX projects, initial benefits are quickly delivered, and each step unlocks further value for the end user (employees in this case) and the business.
And if there’s a silver lining to the cloud, it’s that the current frontline DEX is often so deficient that even simple changes have a huge impact!
Start with learning the stories of frontline staff, and then begin to engage key stakeholders in forward-looking conversations. Opportunities will quickly become apparent, and with strong leader support, it’s possible to get significant cut-through in a short period of time.
