Employee Engagement Is Critical For Customer Experience (CX)

Many organizations focus on becoming more digital on the outside. Yet our research shows that most are far from being digital on the inside. Most organizations have not yet adopted their work culture and processes to change the way they innovate and work. Employee engagement sits at the center of workspace transformation — and, thus, your innovation and customer experience activities.

Customers often cannot pinpoint the root causes of a bad experience. Customers can evaluate their own experiences only up to a point. They only see a fraction of the people, processes, systems, and policies that affect their experiences. Employees are in a different position. When CX is poor, customer experience professionals often don’t know why.

Systematically collecting feedback from employees provides context for how customers perceive their experiences and helps identify process, policy, and technology hurdles that hinder CX delivery. It also gives insight into the quality of employees’ experiences. The support of employee engagement therefore requires a simultaneous focus on customer and employee experiences.

Collecting employees’ feedback is necessary but insufficient to identify the root causes of problems in the ecosystem. It is essential to integrate themes from both employees’ and customers’ feedback. Where both customers’ and employees’ feedback coincide highlights a real problem for CX delivery. This is why it is increasingly important to involve employees in identifying root causes of CX problems.

The increased role of all employees in CX initiatives also means empowering employees to implement ideas right away. Work with employees to prioritize systemic issues. Involving employees in CX problem solving will also create greater buy-in. Make the collection and use of their feedback transparent. Recognize employees who provide feedback and share top themes. Update employees who provide feedback, and let them know how you’re using their insights and ideas. Free up and train employees to improve feedback quality.

Your Employees And Colleagues Are Facing Significant Changes In The Workplace

For instance, employees will work in multigenerational workforces. Structured physical work will go down. Empathy-requiring positions will increase. Employees will rely more on augmented, virtual, and extended reality. They will work in more flexible work arrangements. Millennials can expect to reskill 15–20 times during their lifetime. Virtual workspaces and collaboration platforms facilitate working across countries or while traveling. Companies will increasingly hire interim talents from outside their normal recruitment market. And hiring based on attitudes, abilities to handle change, and outlooks rather than grades and qualifications will increase. Carefully managing this transformation process is essential to boost employee engagement.