Customer Experience = Employee Experience

I’ve been reflecting on my time working at the branch and what my front line experience taught me. It allowed me to be close to the customer, to understand the nuances of the interaction and what the customer really needed.

The closer we can be to the customer, the more pronounced issues are – and the quicker we can fix them. This is why customer-facing employees are a great asset. They collect insight from every interaction they have, they understand when we have an issue, and they should feel empowered to solve it.

For us at TD, customer experience (CX) has defined the brand of our organization, it is in our DNA and a top priority for our senior leadership team. We want to ensure that we continuously improve and deliver on what people know us for. And we are clear that the delivery of the brand is in the hands of the employees, making the employee experience (EX) a significant conduit of the brand promise we keep.

Bharat Masrani – our CEO at TD – recently said "we are all customer-facing" and that is precisely how we move forward as an organization. We're challenging ourselves to be "customer obsessed", which means to embody the experience of a customer we need to think like one. We might be working in various departments, but we all share the same goal, to create legendary customer experiences.

One of the ways I bring our customer obsessed culture to life is by starting each leadership meeting with a customer story. This allows us to ground each discussion around how we can make decisions that impact the CX and EX.

I recently held my Global Marketing Townhall where my team and I spent an entire morning discussing how we are all customer-facing. We covered our commitments to help our teams get work done faster, the importance of our brand and customer experience – and how every decision we make needs to be done as if our customers are in the room. We were joined by Toronto Blue Jays All-Star George Springer, who told us how the Blue Jays live the same ethos on customer experience. He spoke to his on-field success being the result of so many people who work behind the scenes. This reflects the culture at TD, and culture is what makes or breaks the employee experience, so we have a responsibility to set our people up for success.

We must unlock potential by investing in the right talent and support their development, invest in the right tools and technology, and more than anything we must create an environment where challenges can be brought forward and addressed.

The organizations that find purpose in doing right by their employees have the traits to do right by their customers.

I will leave you with a quote from Shep Hyken, a customer experience expert, “A brand is defined by the customer's experience. The experience is delivered by the employees” – and I couldn’t agree more.