In this write-up, we will look at how employee experience can help create a positive impact on customer experience?
The goal of every organization is to make its customers happy. And one way to ensure that is by making your employees your brand ambassadors. In simple words, we call it employee experience.
Now, you might have read many times that customers should be the brand ambassadors of your company. But we would go a step ahead and say your employees can play a vital role in making your customers feel valued and listened to.
So, why not make your employees feel valued and create an environment that makes your customers happy during the sale. This is the crux of the employee experience concept.
In the forthcoming sections of this write-up, we will look at how employee experience can help create a positive impact on customer experience?
So, let’s get started.
The most popular business proverb, “Customer is the King”, shows that customers are the heartbeat of any business. All the time and efforts put in by businesses are for the sole purpose – to satisfy customer needs and make them happy. While there are several factors determining customer experience, a positive employee-centric work culture also adds to it. While this remains to be frequently ignored, an employee-focused work culture is one of the strongest pillars on which the structure of happy and satisfied customers can be built. If a business cannot keep its employees happy and satisfied, it may be difficult for it to hold customers for very long.
Once a business learns the art of creating employee-focused culture, it can magically turn into a brand that makes its customers happy. A business can win and retain loyal customers only by providing them exceptional customer experience. And this feat can be achieved only when employees work wholeheartedly to provide the customers the best experience they can y have. It is needless to say that this enthusiastic behavior can be expected from employees only when they are satisfied with what they receive from the business hiring them.
So, you must note that employees are as important as customers for the success or failure of a business. An employee-focused culture in an organization is the sure-shot way of winning happy customers.
There are numerous benefits an organization can enjoy if the employees of the organization are happy and satisfied. Here are some of the benefits of employee experience to an organization –
Many business research and studies have indicated a strong relationship between employee experience and customer experience. This means if your employees are happy and satisfied, the same will reflect in your customer experience, which is true for an unsatisfied employee experience. For example, a survey of U.S. business leaders done by Gallup in 2014 clearly came with the result that “happy employees are the key to happy customers”.
Whether a customer has a positive or negative experience with your business, an employee is always there in the equation. Today, it has become more important for businesses to focus on a positive experience for customers because every customer has the power to make negative feedback about your organization go viral on social media channels. Any unpleasant experience can be blown out of proportion by social media channels. The only element that can save your organization from negative customer feedback is your employees who ‘genuinely’ cares for the reputation of your business. When employees are satisfied with the organization, they will do everything to protect and safeguard its reputation.
Satisfied employees and happy customers are the two strongest pillars of competitive advantage in the market. Every organization in the market knows that happy customers are the magnet for attracting more customers to an organization. But very few acknowledge the fact that internal ‘customer’, i.e. the employees too, can work as a magnet for the organization. A happy employee attracts and keeps customers happy, while unsatisfied employees may work as a repulsive magnet sending customers away to the competitors with their bad customer services. The organizations that understand this are the market leaders in their respective industries.
A most common mistake done by many small businesses is that they assume that timely paychecks guarantee the employees’ happiness. The main goal of employees may be to earn a living, but paychecks only cannot make employees happy. The Gallup survey showed that companies with a higher rate of satisfied employees pay attention to factors like clarifying work expectations to employees well in advance, promoting collaborative work culture among employees, and providing the right tools required to get their work done.
Investing time and effort in employee happiness factors can create magical results in terms of happy customers. So, businesses need to understand the importance of employee-centric work culture and incorporate the required elements in their business. The essential elements or the key pillars that can create the magic includes –
If you successfully create the right level of empowerment for your employees, it will help you deliver better customer experiences.19
Always keep in mind, when your vision, mission, and values are deeply ingrained in your company’s DNA, your employees will be more driven towards providing extraordinary customer experiences!