An engaged workforce is the key to a better customer experience (CX).
When you have highly engaged employees behind your business, research shows you’ll outperform the competition by nearly 150%. Plus, you’ll likely see 10% higher customer satisfaction metrics.
Watch the webinar recording: Rethinking the Employee Experience in the New World of Work.
If you want to reap the same bottom-line benefits of a great employee experience (EX), while enjoying the perks of great customer experience—like increased loyalty, higher customer lifetime value, and so on—treating your employees well is a critical first step.
But, despite the obvious importance of an engaged workforce, most companies are falling short. In 2021, Gallup reported that less than half of U.S. workers (39%) considered themselves engaged—or “highly involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace.” Meanwhile, another 14% are “actively disengaged.”
Take a look at your own teams: 3 in 5 of your employees would say they’re either not engaged or disengaged. This is a pretty big problem, especially given the correlation between EX and CX.
If you want to improve your CX strategy, you don’t need to wander too far. Instead, start where you are and focus on creating better engagement with your employees. We’re sharing a few simple ways to make it happen.
1. Go beyond numbers and rankings.
The dismal state of employee engagement isn’t necessarily due to a lack of effort on the part of employers. You may already be proactively offering resources and guidance to your staff to help alleviate burnout and improve engagement.
You’re probably using tools like surveys and performance ratings to detect problems in your workplace that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, though, these traditional research methods tend to fail.
The problem with basic surveys and ratings is that they reduce your employees into mere data points. In some cases, this is actually contributing to the problem—or it’s counterproductive at best.
For instance, think about traditional performance management systems, where you rank and rate your workers based on manager feedback and KPIs. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Stanford University management science professor Robert Sutton, “In most organizations, traditional performance reviews are so bad they do more harm than good.”
For years, we’ve known from neuroscience research that performance rankings discourage thoughtful conversations about employees’ careers. Although they might be well-intentioned, they’re actually detrimental to overall performance in the long run.
Instead, experts recommend trading this numbers game for meaningful and regular two-way conversations. Instead of pulling out report cards, managers can act like coaches who take the time to understand their employees’ talents and ambitions. They can offer feedback that is both subjective and objective—and employees will notice the difference. Open dialogue with employees supports goal-driven action and deeper relationships.
If you’re still stuck on quantitative results alone, it’s time to rethink those traditional employee engagement tactics and embrace methods that allow for a two-way conversation with your workforce.
2. Engage regularly with your employees.
The open dialogue we’re talking about doesn’t work if you speak with an employee for one hour, once per year. If you’re like most companies, you’re not engaging frequently enough with your workforce.
If you’re relying on annual reviews, you’re missing out on 364 days worth of opportunities to connect. As SHRM reported, one performance leader at Deloitte saw a 10% rise in employee engagement through a new approach to employee performance, “based on the concept that performance is continuous, not based on cyclical milestones.”
You might also be limited to an annual employee engagement survey to get a pulse check on your workforce. But did you consider the drawbacks? The occasional ad-hoc survey isn’t conducted with enough regularity to build an understanding of what truly matters to your employees.
For employee engagement to help drive a better customer experience, getting feedback from your own people should be part of your culture. That means gathering feedback often, and turning those touchpoints into real conversations.
To provide a better workplace, you need to understand what motivates your employees and what matters to them—and how those perspectives change over time. Build a community of engaged workers and ask them regularly for feedback. Soon enough, you’ll start gaining the employee intelligence you’ve been lacking.
3. Treat your employees well.
Of course, it’s not enough to just listen to your employees. How you treat them matters, too. Once you know how your workers want to be treated, enact changes that will make a difference and have a direct impact on the employee experience.
Then, close the feedback loop and show how employee insights are driving change. This is an important step to ensuring that your people are committed to your organization.
Why does it matter? Well, going back to where we started, your employees are an incredibly important piece in the customer experience puzzle. It’s impossible to have a seamless end-to-end brand experience if your workforce doesn’t have a customer-centric mindset or the resources to keep customers happy.
Plus, your workers are the ones out there interacting with your customers. As a result, they’re also a critical source of CX insights. Chances are, there are employees on your teams who have great ideas for how to improve your products and processes. If you invest in EX and show support for your employees, there’s a higher chance they’ll be willing to help you invest in CX.
If you don’t have employee engagement at the top of your priority list, you’ll have a hard time pushing the CX agenda forward. When it comes to EX and CX, keeping your customers happy and keeping your employees engaged are two sides of the same coin.
