Transforming the Customer Experience and Employee Experience

Most organizational decisions are made because there’s a business case positively affecting the bottom line.

Innovative companies realize that these wins aren’t always quick — they sometimes require an investment in both time and money. In this article, let’s talk about one of the most strategic investments for your company: improving the customer experience (CX) by improving the employee experience (EX).

According to HBR, your employees’ perception of your company is contagious. If you give your team something to be inspired by and loyal to, they’ll pass that on in their work.

What is customer experience (CX), and why does it matter to your business?

Customer experience refers to the interactions your customers have with your organization, product, and services. It covers the value gained from using your product or services and the perception your customers and end users have about your offerings.

Having a positive CX means that customers enjoy interacting with your sales and support team, are proud to be users of your products, and trust that you can offer accuracy and uptime.

What is employee experience (EX)?

Employee experience is all about how your employees feel about your company. EX is affected by company culture, compensation, trust, learning opportunities, and other benefits. A robust remote employee experience (REX) is vital to managing asynchronous staff in different countries and time zones.

EX is improved by paying employees fairly, building an environment where teams can grow and develop their skills, and fostering a management style built on psychological safety and servant leadership. Fostering a positive EX contributes to desirable employee outcomes like retention, increases in efficiency, increases in personnel proficiency and subject matter expertise, and employee engagement.

How does EX relate to CX?

When you create a positive employee experience, engaged employees will have more mental energy for customer interactions, greater capacity to complete projects, and greater loyalty to their employers.

In short, positive EX trickles down to positive CX. In fact, according to IDC, 85% of surveyed business leaders note a correlation between positive EX and positive CX.

Here are some ways positive EX can affect CX:

• Professional services firms: Consultants, accountants, and other knowledge workers offer customers value because of their skill sets, education, and proficiencies. When these professional services staff are set up for success by their organizations, they’ll have more bandwidth and brain space to brainstorm creative solutions to customers’ problems.
• Customer service staff: From front-line workers to call center employees, it’s important to serve people quickly, resolve complaints, and “surprise and delight” your customers. Happy customer support teams are inspired to go the extra mile, meaning you’ll increase customer and brand loyalty, upsell opportunities, or powerful testimonials that can be used for marketing and PR. 
• Developers and coders: With positive EX, programming experts are less likely to turnover, meaning that you’ll be able to take down tech debt, hold on to institutional knowledge, and engage in continuous improvement. If your developers aren’t happy, they’ll go elsewhere, leaving you with potentially unresolved bugs or features that aren’t shipping. And when you’re a software company that’s not shipping new tools, you’re guaranteed to have stagnant or negative CX.

Improving EX with Hubstaff

If customer surveys are returning low scores or clients are churning in favor of your competitors, it might be time to look at the customer experience you’re offering. Here are some ways Hubstaff can help improve EX:

• Keep employees happy with accurate payroll. One of the quickest ways to demoralize your team is to pay them late or incorrectly. With Hubstaff’s payroll software, any tracked time can be turned into an invoice and paid directly through Hubstaff or one of our integrations like Quickbooks or PayPal.
• Make lines of communication clear with improved task and project management. For remote teams especially, it’s essential to cut through communication ambiguity so everyone knows what to work on. Our project management tool, Hubstaff Tasks, offers easy-to-use templates, due dates, file uploading, Gantt-style charts, Kanban boards, and more to make 
• Add some fun to work through goals and achievements. Marking things off your checklist or seeing your work recognized is always rewarding. Use achievement badges and SMART goals in Hubstaff’s goal tracker tool to keep your team motivated and feeling accomplished. 
• Decrease annoying busywork and focus on creative improvements by using automation. Manually filling in hours is time-consuming and not a good use of bandwidth. With Hubstaff’s automated employee timesheet software, get time back so you can work on new initiatives for increasing EX.

When you’re putting your people first, you’ll inspire them to give their best work, which means they’ll provide outstanding service and deliver great products for your customers. When investing in EX, you’re investing in CX, which means investing in your business. Win by diving deep into employee experience to improve sales, service, or production!