The Rise in Employee Experience

Hello and welcome back to the CX Newsletter, where we bring you bi-weekly insights into the world of CX. This week we bring you an interview with Benjamin Easaw, CCXP , Managing Director, Digital Experience Design for Cetera Financial Group . Easaw was previously the Senior Director of Global CX Research, Strategy & Enablement for Thomas Reuters, and gave a talk at the CX BFSI Exchange on the West Coast back in May on ?"The Tortoise and the Hare: Taking the Time to Build Your Strategy From the Ground-Up".

How did you get into your role at Cetera??

I have been deeply entrenched in CX for the best part of 20-plus years now, either as a consultant or practitioner. In my current role, I am managing a digital transformation effort that has been ongoing for a couple of years. Leadership wants to embed foundational CX principles as the effort progresses.

How has Cetera implemented a bottom-up approach to customer centricity, and what are the challenges of doing this??

This transformation is essentially a grass-roots level project but applying CX disciplines along the way to ensure the foundation is solid and extensible. Like many organizations, the need for improvement exists across an enterprise. Cetera is no different, in that opportunities for improvement exists in multiple capacities. The medium-term goal is to build on the achievements from the digital transformation work and find ways to adopt and scale it in other parts of the enterprise.?

Why is it important to introduce a holistic CX strategy?

In many organizations, more and more conversations are happening about the importance of customer-centricity and CX in general, but unfortunately, they are taking place in silos. The analogy I use is likened to building a house. You cannot begin building a house without a sound blueprint that guides the construction process. Similarly, there needs to be a “blueprint” that guides the overall CX plans.?

Keep in mind a customer engages with a brand across many touchpoints — they could have a great experience at one touchpoint and a poor one at another. Applying CX strategies in a siloed manner will make it very difficult to achieve consistency of the experience delivery across the full customer journey. As a result, customer sentiments are all over the map and VOC metrics are hard to action. This is one of the central reasons why beginning with a holistic CX strategy is vital and can pay enormous dividends in the long-term.

In a previous role, I had to overhaul the existing CX program from the ground up and implement it globally. Beginning the effort properly sanctioned consistency and scalability across the organization. This allowed us to maintain and deliver consistent experiences to the customer across all touchpoints.

As a result, you begin to realize gains in a concept I call Sentiment Durability, which I will explain more about at the conference. CX is successful when it begins with a sound business strategy embodied in CX principles.?

How has Cetera improved their Employee Experience (EX)?

We are in the early stages of measuring and acting on EX. We conduct employee surveys and use the results to improve matters identified in the feedback.

For example, we have recently instituted a practice where the whole organization blocks out 2-hours on Tuesday afternoons where no internal meetings are to be scheduled…and this is company-wide.

It is to provide some focus time and gives much-needed respite from meetings. In a previous role, the EX portion was planned into phase 2 of the larger CX rollout to ensure we established foundational principles before embarking on transforming the culture. I think if you do not align EX strategies to the core CX approaches for the business, there will be incongruities in the long term and both EX and CX will become ineffective.

Why do you think investments in EX have been on the rise recently?

Research and data have shown over and over that a proper culture is vital for company growth. Moreover, the people in an organization become a differentiator in the competitive landscape that is not easily replicated. EX is taking on a similar cycle I have seen in the early stages of CX, when customer experience was a hot topic and brands wanted to jump on the bandwagon.

Some companies are looking to EX as a lifesaver to prop up failing CX efforts. Others who began properly are now moving into EX as next step in their journey towards organizational maturity. They want to ensure the delivery of on-brand experiences, which is what makes EX so powerful.

Do you think EX is a phase, or is it here to stay for a lot longer?

That is a good question. I think for many organizations it will be a phase, and for others, it will be deep-rooted. As a consultant, I used to tell executives that their employees do not come to work every day thinking “how can I deliver a bad experience to the customer”.

If the experience delivery is poor, it is usually a result of inferior policies, processes, or systems. The employee must constantly deal with a disparate ecosystem. It is frustrating because on the one hand, they want to deliver great service, but their working ecosystem is mediocre at best and that leads to irritations which spill over into their engagement with the customer.

It will be interesting to see which organizations truly understand how EX plays into the overall CX strategy. Companies that are serious about it will do well. Others will look at it as a quick fix to bad implementations of CX.

What are your predictions for CX over the next 5 years?7

I think many organizations will either abandon or minimize their CX efforts as they will not see the results they were expecting. They did not start with the right approach to CX, and leadership will look to other solutions when expectations are not met. Others that began correctly will see improvements in their customer sentiments and the bottom line. The CX foundations they established will help to grow and accelerate the share of wallet as other competitors start dropping off.

Luke Wakeling, Editor

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