Total experience in the workplace and why it matters
Business success depends on happy employees and happy customers – and it’s time we stopped thinking of them as two unconnected groups
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Every organisation promises to offer customers a better experience, but as customers themselves know all too well, not all organisations deliver. There is a simple – but often overlooked – reason for that: employees who want to focus on the customer often aren’t given the necessary tools to do the job. As a result, well-intentioned staff can’t help customers because systems don’t work properly and processes aren’t fit for purpose.
Consumers know exactly what’s going on. According to recent research conducted by ServiceNow, the intelligent platform for digital transformation, 90 per cent of consumers want to purchase from companies that treat employees well. These are the same customers who wait as call centre staff try to extract their information from a multitude of systems, who grow frustrated as they are passed from one team to another and asked the same questions over and over again. Harried staff are apologetic but helpless.
90%
of consumers want to purchase from companies that treat employees well
60%
would be less likely to engage with a company knowing its staff were unhappy
To address this problem, organisations need to focus on “total experience”, argues David Irvine, Senior Sales Director at ServiceNow. This is an approach that considers the employee and customer experience holistically, rather than separately. “The line between customer experience and employee experience is vanishingly thin,” Irvine says. “You can’t have a great customer experience without a great employee experience, so we should stop thinking about them separately.”
The rewards for organisations able to move away from that siloed approach are significant, Irvine promises. ServiceNow’s research found 45 per cent of organisations that moved to a total experience approach saw an immediate uplift in their sales revenues. They benefited directly from integrating their efforts to address customer experience and employee experience.
45%
of organisations that moved to a total experience approach saw an immediate uplift in their sales revenues
Beth Ard, the Founder of Customer Thrive, a consultancy that helps clients take a total experience approach, has seen that happen in real time. “What we find is that each time there is some sort of disappointment or poor experience for the customer, you can trace it back to the employee experience,” she says. “Often a workflow issue or a technical failure means the employee is simply unable to deliver what the customer wants.”
Crucially, Ard argues, employees can bridge the disconnect between organisations and customers. “Your customer doesn’t think or talk in your corporate language,” she says. “But your employees speak both languages – they understand the problems that frustrate the customer, and they can translate those into the language of your business.”
Your employees speak both languages – they understand the problems that frustrate the customer, and they can translate those into the language of your business
It's not simply that employees are struggling to help customers. As they struggle with poor systems and processes, they are growing frustrated and disengaged themselves. Research from the consultant McKinsey suggests that employees who have a positive experience feel 16 times more engaged than those whose experience is negative. And a one-point improvement in how staff feel about their employers, as measured by Glassdoor, drives a 1.3 point increase in customer satisfaction.
Mark Allen, Director of Employee Experience Solutions at ServiceNow, urges organisations to focus on this data. “Think about what a day in the life of your employees looks like, and all the things you could do to make it possible for them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively,” he says. “What will enable them to offer a seamless experience to the customer?”
Making the shift to a total experience is part mindset and part technology, but organisations do not necessarily have to reinvent their IT systems. What they really need is a means to connect the silos – a platform that enables them to build end-to-end processes that draw data from every part of the organisation. “You may not need to rip out your systems, but you do need to connect them,” Allen says.
Finding solutions that ensure employees can spend time with customers will also pay dividends. Irvine points to the example of a high street bank where customer assistants’ time was dominated by dealing with errors related to payments – as many as 500,000 a year. Automation software enabled the bank to deal with almost three-quarters of the errors without manual intervention, freeing up huge amounts of time for staff to deal with more complicated customer issues.
Get it right and there is scope for huge gains, argues the market research specialist Gartner, which has described total experience as one of the key ingredients required for successful digital transformation. By 2024, organisations that move to a total experience approach will outperform their competitors by 25 per cent in satisfaction metrics for both customers and employees, Gartner predicts.
By 2024, organisations providing a total experience will outperform competitors by
25%
in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX
That sort of outperformance translates directly into commercial gain. Research from Harvard Business Review suggests an improved employee experience could drive revenue increases of as much as 50 per cent.
The bottom line is that happy staff lead to happy customers – and more sales. Businesses that focus on total experience, rather than thinking of employee and customer experience as two separate challenges, will benefit accordingly.
