Customer Experience follows Employee Experience

Customer experience is the new marketing. It kind of makes sense.

In today's connected world it's all too easy for people to spread the word on social, leave reviews on well-trusted sites and to create a long standing review of your services or products on the web. What do you want them to say about you and your products or services?

It's therefore a REALLY good idea to focus on Customer Experience. This could be the product you're building, the service you offer and the actual customer experience in store, on the phone etc.

I've done posts before on Friction Versus Reward and building customer service teams here and here.

This post today is about the connection between employee experience and customer experience.

In Growing a Business, Paul Hawken has this golden line:

You cannot have great customer experience without first having great employee experience

It is SO true.

Sure, you may find a customer service rep who, even working in the most toxic environments, finds it within their own character to continue to deliver amazing experiences for customers, but that is rare. It's all too common to find customer facing roles passing on the crap work culture to the customers.

As such, it's essential to focus on the employee experience.

By cultivating a workplace that enriches the lives of all who work in it, we are setting the foundations for excellent customer experience.

When people care about their work and the company, they will look for ways to improve the business. When people feel respected, trusted and utilised, they will bring their best selves to work - and to the customer.

A holiday

On a recent holiday we stayed in a wonderful hotel. The grounds were lovely, the room was very nice and the pool was spectacular. However, the whole experience was let down by the most awful customer experience by the staff. With the exception of maybe two people, the staff were surly, unhelpful, grumpy and rude.

I intend on leaving a very honest Trip Advisor review 😄

When customers pay for something they expect a good experience - and typically, the more they pay, the better that experience needs to be.

That could be a holiday like this example, or a service like broadband, or a product like a new washing machine. Each comes with an expectation about the product or service itself, the delivery, the packaging, the customer support - the whole experience. When this doesn't meet expectations we are left unimpressed.

But all of this stems from an employee experience.

Even in great companies you will get occasional poor service from people but managers are quick to deal with this through feedback, training and better hiring.

In the most toxic environments it's highly likely no amount of training will work, feedback is largely non-existent and managers tend to hire anyone who won't leave due to the culture.

The Job Interview

I remember going for a job interview many years ago for a large bank you will absolutely have heard of.

I got the job offer in under 10 minutes in the interview. Too easy. So, I asked to meet the team and see the office. They hesitated but eventually let me through to meet the team. The team all looked stressed, fed up and bored. There were no conversations happening and the energy in the room was devoid of anything resembling fun and enriching.

When the manager chaperoning me went off to speak to someone, one of the team turned to me and said

"If you have any other choice at all, do not take the job".

I did have choices and didn't take this job.

Responsibility of managers and leaders

Good customer experience comes from a good employee experience - and this is the remit and responsibility of leaders and managers. You cannot possibly expect people to go above and beyond and provide excellent experience, if you do not treat employees well.

It's the foundations of everything here at Cultivated Management - building companies that enrich the lives of all who work in them. And when we get this right, and help other people get this right too, we see better business results, retention of good staff, business improvements and of course, exceptional customer service.

If you, as an employee, do not feel valued, trusted and respected, it's going to prove monumentally hard for you to treat customers with the value, trust and respect that they deserve. A company lives by its customers - no customers, no business.

Yet, almost every day I encounter a business where the service is poor, whether through the product, or the customer service interaction. Behind the scenes you've got to wonder whether there is a culture of good employee experience.

I don't believe people are incompetent or malicious or out to do a bad job - I believe they are an outcome of the culture of the company.

I've seen people who were awful at customer service in one team, who then thrive in another. What's changed? The team they're in, the leader, the culture. And yes, it's entirely possible to have micro cultures within a company.

If you're in the business of customer experience (which we all are to some extent), it certainly pays to do training, provide the right equipment, hire well etc - but not if you're not firstly focusing on building better employee experience.

You cannot have great customer experience without first having great employee experience