Employee Experience is the New Battlefield

When I was a Gartner analyst, I co-authored a special report that called customer experience the new battlefield for competitive advantage. At the time, Gartner research showed that, more than any other attribute--product, price, and the like--it was the quality of the experience that kept customers coming back for more—and often willing to pay a premium over available alternatives.

It was a headline that got attention and, in some small way, contributed to what became a widespread movement to improve customer experiences. 

In general, this movement made a positive contribution to the average customer experience we all now enjoy in B2C and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in B2B. But behind the scenes there was a fair amount of dysfunction and thrashing as companies struggled to get their arms around something as broad, amorphous, and encompassing as the customer experience.

One of the mistakes I saw over and over was a failure to understand and act on root cause. Measuring customer sentiment is interesting, but it isn’t particularly useful until and unless you determine what’s making customers feel that way.

Then--and only then--you can take action.

Another mistake I saw too often was treating customer experience as superficial window dressing, expending time and effort creating the appearance of what is commonly perceived as a modern and enlightened customer experience, but failing to invest in “the people part.”

The people part, of course, is the employee experience. It should be no surprise that the employee experience correlates directly with the customer experience. When employees are unhappy and disengaged, guess what happens? That sentiment accrues to the customer experience. As customers, we’ve all been on the wrong side of this one with alarming regularity.

Which brings me to the topic of employee experience, something that’s becoming a movement in its own right—and at a time when it’s critically important to not only an exceptional customer experience, but to the continuity of business itself.

The great diaspora of the modern workforce has collided with a reckoning on diversity, equity and inclusion at a time when the talent wars are already raging. Keeping employees happy and making them successful isn’t just about the customer experience--it’s also about how companies continue to keep the lights on.

And in the same way that the success of customer experience initiatives depends fundamentally on root cause data, so too do employee experience initiatives. 

Apply the same logic: measuring employee sentiment is interesting, but it only becomes useful when you understand what makes them feel that way.

Which is why people analytics is having its moment. Companies like Visier shine light in the darkest corners of a distributed workforce, helping you to understand what makes employees feel the way they feel. And in doing so, it gives managers a superpower--to make better decisions on behalf of the business, the employee, and ultimately the customer.

You see, all of these things are all interconnected. CX depends on EX. Both depend on an understanding of root cause. But ultimately both come back to getting the people part right.