“To win in the marketplace, you must first win the workplace” – Doug Conant, Former CEO, Campbell Soup.
Happy customers start from happy employees. So, when we speak about customer experience and why it’s so important, we must also address the importance of employee experience. If your employees aren’t satisfied with the company, then you have little potential to earn your customers’ satisfaction.
But, What Is Employee Experience?
Employee Experience (EX) refers to the overall perception an employee develops about the organization they work for during their tenure. It’s the result of cumulative attitudes, feelings, emotions, and expectations that arise from all the interactions the employee has with the organization.
Employee experience stems from a positive and hospitable work culture that’s fostered within the organization. Therefore, it cannot be garnered with a single motivation program or corporate retreat. For employee experience to be a truly shining aspect within an organization there should be a clear agenda on how it prioritizes its employees. This should include career progress opportunities, education and skill development programs, financial perks, and other forms of incentives offered to employees.
If businesses are serious about improving Customer Experience (CX) and building a customer-centric brand, they have to focus on their employees first. Your employees are the people who directly engage with customers with more knowledge about their preferences, expectations, and pain points. Therefore, there is an immense potential to enhance CX through them.
How does this happen? How exactly can EX lead to CX?
1. Happy Employees Create Happy Customers
When an organization invests special efforts to take care of its employees, support their job roles, and uplift their morale, it benefits from a confident, optimistic, and happy workforce. This way, you create an environment where employees love to work. When employees are motivated by factors that go beyond their salaries and wages, their effort to contribute to the organization also goes beyond their predefined job description.
Employees become more empathetic towards customers’ requirements and try their best to fulfill them. They engage with customers proactively, motivate them to use the product/service, and help you hit higher numbers of sales. Moreover, happy employees make customers feel more at ease during their interactions through an optimistic attitude that encourages people to come back. They communicate with customers more effectively, take their feedback seriously, and suggest measures to fix pain points to the management.
So, an organization can easily improve customer experience without a lot of effort. When you take care of employees, they take care of customers!
2. Employee Experience Nurture Organizational Growth
An important requisite for a positive employee experience is employee engagement. Engaged employees in a supportive work culture tend to be more efficient and productive in their job roles. They are enthusiastic about their activities and always seek out the best ways in which they can achieve the goals and objectives of their functional unit or department.
Eventually, each person ends up delivering their best input to the organizational tasks. This benefits the company in a plethora of ways.
First, it improves cooperation where employees, management, and the board of directors constantly communicate to identify the best strategy to succeed. Second, it eliminates silos within the organization as there’s improved coordination between departments. Moreover, it leads to shared knowledge and teamwork as employees begin to understand that each task is integrated with the other. In this regard, every unit of the business becomes more efficient and functions to the optimum level.
Automatically, every phase in the customer journey is fine-tuned, and doing business with the brand becomes a seamless and enthusiastic task for customers. In other words, every interaction becomes a joy to the customer! What more can you ask for?
3. Employee Experience Enhances Your Brand Image
The benefit of satisfied and enthusiastic employees doesn’t end with higher productivity or better customer service. If employees are deeply attached to the organization they work for, they advocate on behalf of it. They promote the business to people they know.
When an organization is reputed for fabulous employee experience, it attracts potential, high skilled employees willing to work with it. But, that’s not it. Even customers begin to regard the business as a humane and ethical brand that strives to promote a good organizational culture for its employees and treats its stakeholders well. They would prefer to do more business with the brand and support it.
So, a positive employee experience can also be one of the greatest competitive advantages a business can have over its rivals. It helps in maintaining a good brand image and attracting new customers while retaining the existing ones.
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