The Shift to Focusing on the Total Experience
Examining the intersection of employee and customer experiences
By Nicole Boyd and Heather Roth
How was your experience the last time you ordered food delivery? Did you utilize your mobile app or laptop to research, scan menus, and ultimately submit your order? What were your impressions of the delivery, did your food arrive on time, was your delivery person pleasant? The pièce de resistance, of course, is the food — was it everything you expected?
What about the last time you went to the doctor? Did you use technology to book your appointment? Did you have to check in and fill out forms when you arrived? Were there any points of friction in your experience, like wait time, prior to your appointment?
Now think about the flip side of both experiences and all the elements that enabled this experience for you. In the restaurant example, this includes the driver, restaurant staff, ordering and tracking system, etc. In the doctor’s office, this would include the receptionist, nurse, doctor, electronic records systems, booking systems, and more.
Ultimately, your experience as a customer is intertwined with the employees’ experience, and it’s time we started thinking about the total experience as the driver for business strategy — creating engaging experiences customers love and employees enjoy providing.
The evolution of focus on experiences
Starting in the 20th century, companies began to clearly focus on the customer and customer experience (CX). There was often a mindset that the customer was always right, no matter the impact behind the scenes to deliver great customer experiences. Then, between 2000 and 2020 — with customer experiences still high in importance — employees began to adopt technology and new ways of working to serve customers. Fast forward to 2023 and there is now a newfound emphasis that employee experiences (EX) matter just as much as customer experiences do.
The formula is simple: happy employees = happy customers, and happy customers = happy investors. Business bottom lines depend on great employees and great customer experiences, or the total experience (TX).
Below are a few stats that showcase the importance and the intersection:
- Teams with high employee engagement have better customer engagement, greater productivity, better retention, and 21% higher profitability.
- Customers are willing to pay 4.5x for an excellent experience versus a poor experience.
- There’s a clear correlation between employee experience and customer satisfaction. On average, a 1-point increase in Glassdoor company rating is associated with a 1.3 increase in customer satisfaction.
Total experience, defined
Customer experience considers valuable experiences that delight target customers, enabling engagement, satisfaction, and retention. On the other hand, employee experience considers how you help employees engage with customers and do their jobs with purpose and ease. Traditionally, CX and EX were seen as separate, but considering how these disciplines are related, and identifying their intersections, can provide companies with a competitive advantage. In fact, Gartner expects companies investing in total experience to exceed competitors in a variety of key satisfaction metrics.
But there’s more: the intricate web of audiences and interactions between technology, data, communications, and support are what bring the total experience to life.
Understanding humans on both sides of CX
There’s been a surge of efforts to focus on the customer to grow and build value, but delivering these experiences has often come at the expense of the employee. While personalized, prompt, engaging, easy to use, always-on, omni-channel interactions are the standard, the data, systems and processes within a company aren’t always able to keep up. This leaves the much of the CX burden to employees dealing with broken data, manual processes, and unrealistic goals. This type of work environment hinders creativity, engagement, innovation, and delivery of strong customer experiences.
How do you inspire employees?
First, give them the information to understand their customer as more than a revenue goal. Data can be used to build audience segmentation and development of personas and archetypes which are an essential tool bring human elements to life. They enable teams to visualize their audience, connect to the people the company/team serves, build empathy, and understand any of their common characteristics, goals, motivations, or experiences.
In a previous article by our team, we discussed how to build a culture of customer experience data by adopting the Ask — Listen — Discover framework. This approach gives you a living, updated stream of data to build these personas or archetypes and monitor changes in their behaviors. Encourage employees to get involved with building and monitoring these customers by getting involved with capturing this data.
Here are examples of methods to do this:
Ask:
Develop strategic surveys to capture experience feedback across the customer journey, and to create and validate hypotheses across the journey. Do user experience testing and really get to know what is challenging their experience with your company and how employees can directly help improve this experience.
Listen:
Engage in qualitative interviews, focus groups, side-by-sides, site visits, observations, and other methods to build empathy and understand human needs, wants, and desires.
Discover:
Evaluating behavioral analytics from digital analytics solutions can be leveraged to further understand human behaviors and experiences across segments. By putting this data in the hands of employees, they can engage in creative exploration to determine the why behind the questions they might be asking about the troubling experience and have data-backed recommendations to deliver a stronger human experience.
Creating end-to-end experiences
Next, with insights from exploration methods cross-functional teams (ops, product, design, tech, etc.) should come together and collaborate to create end-to-end experiences for customers. Tools like journey maps and service blueprints can support this.
While it does take a team effort to produce these artifacts, they provide benefits such as:
- Articulating experiences visually and documenting the current state to identify opportunities for bring experiences to life
- Enabling an organization to better understand the humans they serve and the experiences they provide in the delivery of their products and services
- Breaking down organizational silos to collaborate and align on experiences end-to-end
- Laying out experiences from multiple points of view (i.e., customers, employees, and other stakeholders) for even more valuable insights
- Identifying customer and employee experience intersections, such as enablers, pain points, opportunities, and other moments that matter
These blueprints are especially useful to visualize both the “frontstage” customer experience and all of the behind-the-scenes or “backstage” variables that are critical to enabling the customer experiences and bringing them to life. The detailed identification of interactions, touchpoints, technology, people, and process, starts to reveal a truly end-to-end and comprehensive view of an experience, and opportunities to improve it. Opportunities can then be prioritized and teams can ideate to brainstorm potential solutions. Solutions can be built and validated with users. Ultimately, blueprints allow cross-functional teams to align on a common vision and roadmap to improve end-to-end experiences through minimum loveable products “MLP” and beyond.
It also allows companies to understand where they need to establish processes for getting better data into the hands of employees, develop mechanisms for giving employees a platform to share ideas for improvement, and provide the right training to access insights or respond to customers on the frontlines. This can be a powerful way to connect your employees to your customers, build empathy, and feel empowered to make a meaningful difference in the customer experience.
Putting the pieces together
Finally, to truly understand the humans on both sides of the experience, develop the same listening strategy for your employees as you do for your customers. Deploying employee feedback mechanisms can help companies track when employees may not feel inspired or enabled to meet customer demands or feel disconnected with customers in a way that does not inspire them to look beyond their role on how to deliver customer experiences.
Because the employee’s work directly enables (and is directly impacted by) every part of the customer experience, it’s important to establish employee feedback touchpoints where you capture customer feedback. This will allow you to correlate employee challenges with meaningful customer impacts and develop strategies to improve the experience on both sides.
Some instances where customer experience insights may uncover opportunities with employees:
- Product teams see low customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, primarily due to difficulties finding the product via site search or filtering. When asked, product and UX teams may provide feedback that they don’t have the appropriate data to fix these experiences or the incentive to ship a feature versus improve CSAT.
- A customer service representative may have a long call that shows negative emotions within the call transcript. When talking to the representative, you may discover that the representative doesn’t have information about the new product that was discussed. They already submitted a ticket, but it’s gone unresolved.
Productive companies have turned the same Ask — Listen — Discover framework for listening to customers inward to listen to employees. Here are some methods to think about for establishing employee listening:
Ask:
Strategic employee surveys allow companies to keep a pulse on employee well-being, empowerment, and connection to the customer. Note that for the date to be useful, these surveys must be created in unbiased ways and have the right internal incentives and feedback loops to encourage productive candor.
Listen:
Create internal feedback loops to allow employees — both on the front lines and those monitoring experience metrics — to share and activate hypotheses based on what they are hearing from the customer. By establishing a culture that incentivizes action on data-backed feedback, employees feel in control to enable strong customer experiences where they can.
Discover:
Watch the processes that employees create to solve their challenges. While many people think “shadow processes” are a challenge, they also indicate an unmet need that may need a solution. Encourage employees to share processes that work to help them gather data and deliver experiences and understand how the company can more broadly support this unmet need.
It’s worth noting that this often requires connected experience management (XM) and other digital solutions that collect and connect customer and employee insights on an ongoing basis. These power more real-time, proactive, enhancements, enhanced personalization, deeper engagement between employees and customers, and more.
Conclusion
Considering the total experience by prioritizing great customer and employee experiences is essential for businesses to compete, grow, and thrive. This prioritization comes with commitment from organizational leaders to an experience-focused strategy, aligned, agile product teams, and investments in the digital solutions (i.e. experience management platforms) that will enable cross-functional teams to both deliver current experience objectives, and evaluate opportunities to innovate.
Delivering total experiences is complex and requires investment, but there are tools and approaches that make it possible. With the right strategy and activation plan, companies can build human-centered organizations with happy employees, happy customers, and improved business bottom line.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
