A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at an event called CX Talks Chicago – an all-day event dedicated to the topic of customer experience – along with Tisha Leslie, Director, Employer Brand at T-Mobile. It was great to collaborate, ideate and present with Tisha, T-Mobile is one of the largest players in the mobile communications business. Our topic? ‘Customers Don’t Come First. Employees Do’.
Employee experience (EX) is equally important as customer experience (CX). I spoke about this a little in a previous blog, drawing parallels between the chicken and the egg example. What comes first? EX and CX both come first. We now have numbers to support that too, we put up an infographic around it.
LEARN ABOUT: Workplace Employee Experience Examples
Many traditionally designed organizations revolve around customers. If a pendulum is supposed to oscillate between customers and employees, for many organizations it stopped swinging, and it stopped with customers. Tisha and I feel it’s time to let the pendulum swing in the other direction.
Organizations need to manage employee experience in a way that becomes a differentiator for their product, service, and brand. Organizations are dedicating resources, time, attention, making big investments in really listening to customers, understanding what they’re experiencing, understanding how that experience impacts their intent to remain loyal to the brand and invest in the product.
The next level of the types of customer satisfaction, how organizations are investing in and spending time managing customer experience should be the same for managing employee experience. If customer experience is that important to us that we can create a kind of an operating system around it, and we say our employees are important to us, why aren’t we doing the same thing for employees? Why don’t we create a common operating system around that? And one of the strongest arguments for doing that is that there’s a really strong connection. CX is about trust and EX helps build that trust.
LEARN ABOUT: Employee Trust
Employees need the kinds of experiences that keep them engaged, connected and gives them a stronger sense of passion, purpose, etc. We know they’re more likely to be out there vocally promoting your brand. And we also know that they are going to be in a better position to serve your customers. It’s proven that many organizations still haven’t made that connection, or they’ve only done so in name or principle, not in action. And again, that’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about lately in the world of employee experience. Everybody gets it, but how do you take action on it? How do you really stay dedicated to it? Understand the culture, get data, find gaps and customize the experience for your employees.
We at QuestionPro rely on data, gathering input on things like agility (how decisions are made, how power is distributed, how change is managed), innovation (how risks are weathered, how creativity takes root, how experimentation happens), and transparency (how information is shared, how credible it is, and how emotion is dealt with). 64 of the 65 things we measure are behaviors. And one of them is a versatile dependent variable with which you are familiar with – Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). It is the answer to the question, “How likely are you to recommend someone you respect to this organization for employment?” Employees that answer with a 10 or 9 are your promoters; those that answer with a 6 or below are your detractors; everyone else is passive.
We use this data – and the extent of our database – to study which of those behaviors, actions, values, and beliefs appear to be driving desired employment outcomes like eNPS. While our studies suggest eNPS in and of itself is a reasonable proxy for things like employee engagement, intent to stay, willingness to put forth discretionary effort, productivity, etc, we all know it is a tremendous indication of how vocal and visible – how authentic our employees will be in promoting your brand. Promoting your brand as an employer, sure. But promoting your brand nonetheless.
Why don’t you try our platform? Check what your organization’s eNPS is and what’s driving your success. Signing up is free and takes only a minute. Run demos, start sending surveys.
