No matter what market they occupy or products they sell, nearly every business prioritizes customer experience above all else. After all, the customer knows best. But outside of the tried-and-true methods – setting policies around customer service, offering customers thoughtful perks, etc. – how can enterprises best ensure a positive customer experience? The answer: by ensuring a positive employee experience first.
As the workplace has become more digital – and with the rise of hybrid work, more dynamic and complex – digital employee experience (DEX) has become fundamental in dictating the success of a business. And that means DEX can have a massive impact on customer experience.
This relationship between customer experience and employee experience was explored in a recent Salesforce study that surveyed more than 4,000 C-level executives and employees. This study is full of insights into just how influential DEX has become – including the tangible revenue boosts that come from improving DEX.
In past articles, we’ve spoken at length about the importance improving DEX in today’s increasingly digital workplace. Now let’s pull back the curtain and explore how employee and customer experience are related – and why prioritizing DEX results in vast improvements to customer experience.
Employee experience and customer experience are not mutually exclusive priorities
As past research has proven, the benefits of proactively managing DEX are significant – from reducing IT costs, to limiting employee burnout and improving retention, to saving hardware costs, and so on. This raises the question: why do so many companies neglect to invest in improving DEX?
In most cases, the issue stems from the misconception that a business must “choose” between employees and customers. According to the Salesforce survey, 88% of executives say their employees are encouraged to prioritize customers’ needs above their own. An average business leader may think: “Of course we want to keep employees engaged and limit turnover, but it’s far more important that we keep our customers happy.”
This is far from surprising; after all, customers are ultimately the people responsible for how much money a business generates. But this well-established philosophy contradicts the wealth of data which shows that customer experience improves most drastically when companies take an employee-first approach.
Using a number of real-world case studies, Salesforce’s survey looked at the link between employee experience and revenue – and their main finding was significant: “Breaking silos between employee experience and customer experience can lead to a massive opportunity for revenue growth of up to 50% or more.”
The connection is clear: when employees have seamless, satisfying work experiences, they’re going to be more engaged, energized, and productive – which in turn improves the quality of interactions they have with customers, the products and services they produce for customers, and the overall sense of connection and community they build between the business and its customers.
Positive Employee Experience Enables Positive Customer Experience
Imagine a sales worker is suffering from burnout due to the pressure to hit their quota. The pressure they feel is amplified by frustration with their poorly-performing devices, and an overall lack of connection with their company culture since the shift to remote work.
This sales worker is still friendly and helpful when he speaks to customers, and he follows all the right steps when delivering demos and sales presentations. But he’s too stressed and overworked to go above and beyond that baseline – he doesn’t have the time or energy to reach out to customers beyond the standard cadence of engagements.
Now imagine that sales worker instead has an amazing, seamless employee experience. He deals with fewer technological issues and digital distractions, improving his work-life balance and helping him avoid burnout. And he completes his day-to-day tasks more efficiently, giving him time to check in more often with customers and let them know he cares about their experiences. And he feels a sense of pride in his work and an alignment with the company’s core message – he isn’t just selling products to hit a quota; he actually believes in the products he’s selling.
The result? The employee’s positive experience rubs off on the customers he engages with, making them feel like the company they buy products from truly cares about them and wants them to succeed.
Aligning Executive Perception and Employee Experience
So a great employee experience can create great customer experiences – but what’s in the way of this happening? Again, we return to the issue of executive perception vs. reality.
Perhaps the most startling finding in Salesforce’s report speaks to the chasm between the way employers perceive their employees’ experiences versus the reality of their employees’ experiences.
In fact, a large percentage of executives and employees are not aligned on many crucial experience factors: engagement, employee happiness, and technology effectiveness:
- 71% of leaders say their employees are engaged with their work, but only 51% of employees agree.
- 70% of leaders report their employees are happy, while only 44% of employees say they actually are happy at work.
- 52% of leaders say that their corporate technology is working effectively, compared to just 32% of employees.
This disconnect between executives and employees is a key hurdle to improving DEX and subsequently improving customer experience.
It’s also proof of the point we’ve made time and time again: proactively listening to employees is one of the most crucial aspects of improving DEX.
Business leaders must look beyond their own perceptions of employee experience and go straight to the source – their employees – for the truth. By continuously gathering employee sentiment data through targeted engagement campaigns and surveys, executives can uncover their blind spots and identify the actual areas of improvement they need to prioritize.
Hopefully, the growing data that supports a correlation between DEX and customer experience will lead to a philosophical shift among business leaders. And no, they don’t need to betray their core belief that the customer matters most.
Rather, they should recognize that their workers play the biggest role in determining customer experience – and that delighting customers becomes a lot easier when they make sure to provide delightful experiences for their employees first.
