Technology’s impact on the employee experience, Part 2
The Experience Trifecta
This is the second in a two-part series on what we call the experience trifecta: combining technology, employee experience and customer experience to create a better communication and collaboration environment that translates to better business outcomes.
SPONSORED POST | Written by Greg Kihlström
Whose job is it to ensure there is a great customer experience? While your organization might have a specific team responsible for managing CX, the real answer is that every employee has some responsibility for delivering value to the customer relationship, no matter where they sit in the organization. Because of this, it is important that employees have the right communication and technology platforms, supportive processes and work methods, and a proper understanding of their role in delivering customer value. And empowering employees’ ability to collaborate and make decisions in real-time can become even more challenging , as businesses continue to adapt to remote and hybrid work environments,
This is the second of a two-part series on what we call the ‘experience trifecta’: combining technology, employee experience and customer experience to create a better communication and collaboration environment that translates to better business outcomes. In this article, we’ll explore the relationship between employee experience and customer experience.
Happy employees equal happier customers
Measuring customer satisfaction and a customer’s willingness to recommend a product or service (utilizing methods such as Net Promoter Score or NPS) are some of the primary ways that companies evaluate their success. There is a very good reason for this: satisfied customers spend more and refer others. Thus, client happiness is an important factor to a company’s bottom line.
Anyone who has managed customer-facing employees will tell you that happier and more engaged employees consistently deliver better customer service...Happy employees create happier customers who buy, buy more, and buy more often. This is true whether they are front-line employees who have direct interactions with customers, behind the scenes, or anywhere in between, with Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report finding that companies with highly engaged workers report 20% higher sales.
Technology plays a key role in employee satisfaction, such as having the ability to share knowledge among employees to solve customer challenges more quickly and effectively. This keeps employees more engaged and able to focus on solving problems, and services customers better and more quickly.
Engaged employees innovate more
Who do you want in charge of designing a customer onboarding process—an unengaged employee that is going to simply “check boxes” to make sure tasks are completed, or a fully engaged team member that is excited to find new ways to delight customers and make them long-term advocates for the brand? Employees who are more engaged always contribute more and better ideas.
And because it’s hard to create great new ideas in a silo, innovation requires communication and collaboration. Employees who are able to communicate and collaborate with one another are able to create better product and service innovations, which directly benefit customers.
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Share and retain knowledge better to serve customers better
Have you ever been a customer at a business where the quality of your experience completely depended on the employee you were dealing with? Many times this discrepancy in service quality is due to how knowledge is shared (or not shared) within the organization.
For instance, a new employee in an organization who lacks effective onboarding or collaboration tools or isn’t properly trained can’t deliver the same service quality as a knowledgeable, well-supported employee. Providing the right training and communication tools to new hires from the outset allows them to hit the ground running, gain confidence and make a contribution to the team early. This encourages loyalty to the company, along with a desire to share their knowledge with newer team members and find even better ways to document and share valuable insights.
The experience trifecta
The right application of communication and collaboration solutions can make a big difference in engagement and productivity of your team. This ultimately contributes to an exceptional customer experience and success of an organization.
To enable the experience trifecta, you need to connect employees with each other using technology that allows collaboration and knowledge sharing. Then, you need to enable those employees to use this greater connectivity to better serve customers, regardless of the role they play within the organization. Now you can see how the experience trifecta, or the special relationship between technology, employee experience, and the customer experience.
To learn more about how to achieve greater employee and customer experience success with our communications and collaboration products and solutions, contact Mitel.
This post was sponsored by Mitel, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Mitel’s positions or strategies.