For over 30 years, the concept popularized by Harvard’s “Service-Profit-Chain” of “Delivering the Employee Experience leads to Delivering the Customer Experience” has been talked about in every company across the globe.  The topic rises to the top of the C-Suite agenda during times of talent shortages and customer experience failures. 

Surprisingly few companies have an Employee Experience that is linked to their customer experience in a way that is clear to new and tenured employees as well as those that are customer-facing and those behind the scenes.  One common approach that leads to this lack of connection is that most employee experience efforts start “inside-out”.  Our experience with global leaders on this topic is that taking an “outside-in” approach makes the connection faster, clearer and accelerates the adoption of changes. 

Employee Experience Improvement – focus on delivering the on-brand customer experience

Global leaders in this area understand that employees in all positions – and at all levels – need to be aligned toward delivering the customer value proposition better than the competition.  Simple, but definitely not easy.  Sports teams work tirelessly to stay on the same page in their practices and film reviews – and still make mistakes every game. 

These leaders use a focus on their customers as the most powerful and successful aligning mechanism – and it starts with customer research and insights.  If you ask 10 senior leaders at any company, they will all say they focus on the customer (seriously, who wouldn’t?) but in fact, each of them have different understanding of customers, see them in different situations, from departmental perspectives and process their insights with different filters and mental models than the leader sitting next to them.  Aligned – I don’t think so. 

Customer Insights that lead to Employee Experience Improvements – the Journey Approach

When you segment customers into similar groups based on needs and behaviors, and then research their journey with your company from beginning to end, you find out where the handoffs happen, where the “baton is dropped”, how well-meaning employees in one department create challenges for customers and employees in other departments – and how to fix all of these. 

Customer journey research & insights typically include:

• Personas – identifying the types of customers who need different experiences so your employees can quickly identify them and provide an “on-brand experience” for that person and their unique situation. If your customer experience conversations include “it depends on the customer …” then this is job one.
• Qualitative Research – Really understanding your customers cannot be done with online surveys. They require real discussions, observations and explanations.  Interviews, focus groups, ethnographic research, in-the-moment video data capture, eye-tracking and other techniques can quickly and affordably provide rich insights and provide content that can be used to focus employee conversations quickly and effectively. 
• Journey Map – No leader – or employee – wants to have to sit through a 75-page powerpoint deck on research results to learn how they can improve the customer experience and business results. Journey maps can do this on 1-page and can be used in dozens of situations at all levels of a company, across all departments and for a variety of purposes.
• Quantitative Research & Journey Metrics – “What gets measured gets managed” is a common (and proven) mantra and if your journey map doesn’t have quantitative data on the frequency of different customer actions, the impact on business results or how to measure the key stages and moments of truth of the customer, it won’t find its way into operational management routines that guide departments and employees. Show employees the direct link from their job to customer journey metrics and they will drive the results you are looking for. 

Employee engagement improvements of 20-40 points across a variety of departments – Sales, Marketing, Operations, Manufacturing, Support (even finance and HR) have been achieved through this approach – and the business results of the improvements provide ROI well over 100%.

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com  for a free consultation on this topic.

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experience in B2C, B2B, and employee journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.