At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations were faced with a challenge – mobilize their employees to effectively work from home, where it was possible. As the world navigated the realities of a global pandemic, the shift to working from home allowed businesses to continue by providing employees with a safe workplace alternative.
A year later and organizations today are facing a challenge of a different kind, scope and scale – how to respond to the need to prioritize Employee Experience. Employees over the last year have evolved.
Today they place even greater value on:
• Connection • Engagement • Efficiency • Purpose •
This challenge is not about optimizing traditional employee engagement programs but rather on recognizing, understanding, and unlocking the collective experience of your employees as a contributor to business outcomes – especially Customer Experience. In other words, it’s about harnessing the things your employees care about, to help you deliver on Customer Experience.
I wanted to share 3 concepts that will help you design an employee experience that drives a positive customer experience. These foundational practices help advance the way an organization thinks about employees, their experience and how they service your customers.
1. Focus on what matters
Companies define brand promises to help them articulate what really matters to their customers (and therefore, to them). Consider the following good examples:
• Nike - "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”
• FedEx - “Peace of mind”
• Allstate - "You're in good hands"
• Lego - "Endless Play"
• BMW - “The ultimate driving machine”
Now consider what your employees spend the majority of their time doing — creating spreadsheets, answering emails, searching for information in different applications and folders… things that take up time but aren’t always as meaningful. If serving customers, and finding ways to leverage their creative and empathetic energy to solve difficult problems for your customers is what motivates your employees, why not try and do more of that?
What if we shifted the way we work, even if just for a moment, so that our teams stop being asked to squeeze customers into their day,
but rather are given the tools, resources and systems they needed to truly solve customer problems?
This doesn’t have to be aspirational at all, it simply starts by being focused. Review the daily journey of your employees, look for moments of friction, and be intentional about removing unnecessary work from their day.
2: Connect the employee and customer experience
When an employee and customer digital experiences converge, the results are amazing.
One of the most relatable examples where we see this happen is in an Apple storefront. Apple’s goal is to create a great experience for everyone that enters their store. Their store experience is designed to deliver a strong customer experience, on the foundation of having create a strong employee experience. Employees are trained to provide exceptional customer service. They are provided with tools to help them respond to customer needs and they are given authority to help work through challenging problems. And at the heart of each Apple store employee, is a belief in the superiority of the product and an understanding that their job is to help Apple serve its customers.
Customers leave happy, educated and knowing how to use their new product all because of the employee whose own experience was designed to make sure that happened.
Your organization may not have a traditional storefront, but there are invariably moments your employees intersect with your customers and you have the opportunity to create memorable experiences. We have spent a lot of time thinking about the customer’s experience, but it’s time to connect the customer’s experience to the experience of your employees.
When you do, you unlock a level of service and care that you can’t achieve in any other way.
3: Crowdsource great experiences
You never know where the next great idea is going to come from. Empower employees and provide them with the tools to allow them to co-create experience and service improvements that can be rolled out for the whole company.
Empathy and design thinking can lead you to find new problems to solve for your customers. Just as you would take a design thinking approach to your Customer Experience you can for Employee Experience as well. In many ways your employees are like a built-in focus group, design team and test laboratory, offering you ways to innovate that are sometimes hard to do with customer facing experiences.
Select individuals to represent different departments or with varied levels of experience to help identify the unmet needs. For example, at Online we engaged team members from across the organization to build an employee journey map that revealed ways that we could improve our internal communications, learning and fostering community among a geographically distributed team.
Summary
Whether you serve your customers in person or through digital channels, your employees are a major contributing factor to customer experience.
Solving problems for customers can be the most rewarding part of the job, but without the right tools, your employees are trapped spending too much time on things the customer never sees.
Digital technology, applied at the right moment in an employee or customer journey, can have a big impact on employee engagement, and when the experience supports both customer and employee journeys, the result can be transformative. However, great customer (or employee) experiences don’t happen by accident, some of the best ideas will come from the employees themselves. Remember to include employees in the creative journey.
About Online’s Digital Studio:
Online's Digital Studio designs ultimate user experiences through new digital products for the web, mobile, IoT, and beyond. Imagine your boldest vision, and achieve it.
