Leadership experts have long held that unhappy employees equal unhappy customers. Therefore, the opposite must be true, right? Business leaders, however, must go beyond that simple intuition and determine if an investment in the employee experience will deliver measurable customer experience outcomes.
There’s a new buzzword in town, and it’s taking the industry airwaves by storm. Our industry’s new object of affection: the employee experience.
Of course, the idea that organizations should pay attention to and improve the employee experience in the form of the workplace, the tools, and the processes they use to perform their tasks is not new. But the idea has found a fresh and reinvigorated buzz as vendors and pundits connect it to both the need to improve the customer experience and the broader push around digital transformation.
The thinking goes that the customer experience is now essential to driving competitive value, but that an organization’s employees must have a conducive work environment to deliver such a positive experience to the customer. Ergo, an investment in the employee experience yields value in the form of a winning customer experience.
On the one hand, this is intuitive. Leadership experts have long held that unhappy employees result in unhappy customers, leading to the assumption that the converse must also be true. The resource-strapped business or IT executive, however, must go beyond that simple intuition and determine if an investment in the employee experience will deliver measurable customer experience outcomes, and, if so, where and how to make those investments.
