Discover the five best employee experience platforms and technologies for improving employee engagement, loyalty, and retention
Researchers have found that companies that outperform the competition when it comes to employee experience (EX) are nearly 2X more likely to have high levels of customer satisfaction and retention, compared to underperforming companies — and not only that, they’re also more likely to report +20% year-over-year revenue growth compared to underperforming organizations. It pays to have the best employee experience, and it can pay to invest in the best employee experience platforms too.
Keep reading to find out what the right EX software can do for your business and which types of solutions to add to your tech stack.
What Is an Employee Experience Platform?
Employee experience software solutions are digital tools that are designed to help employee experience teams, senior leadership, and managers understand — and optimize — the employee experience and business outcomes.
The best employee experience platforms enable employers to measure how workers feel at any given moment in time across the entire employee journey, from when a potential hire first applies for a position, until their last day on the job.
Getting a 360-degree view of the employee experience is crucial to understanding drivers of employee engagement and turnover, the relationship between employee experience and the customer experience (CX), and being able to advance employee retention, customer satisfaction, revenue, and other important business outcomes.
5 Employee Experience Technologies to Add to Your EX Tech Stack
These are the best employee experience platforms for gathering timely employee feedback, measuring employee sentiment and engagement, identifying and intervening at the earliest signs of employee turnover, and unlocking insights to uplevel the employee experience and customer experience.
#1: Real-time employee experience survey tools and employee feedback software
Gather feedback from your team members anywhere, anytime, and across channels and devices — via email, SMS, your company’s intranet or app, or via a QR code placed in person, such as where workers clock in — by harnessing the power of anytime surveys. Check in on how folks are doing at key points during the employee lifecycle, such as upon hire, after onboarding, at employment anniversaries, following manager changes, and more, for insights into what individuals think about the company’s recruitment, onboarding, and talent development experiences.
Designed to drive participation with short, simple questionnaires that can be launched and answered at any time, real-time employee surveys generate immediate feedback that leaders and managers can take action on ASAP, such as after launching pilot initiatives or when facing a new crisis or challenge. With a timely pulse on the voice of the employee, companies not only have visibility to the impact of every change, they can quickly make tweaks, measure the effects, and drive outcomes while evolving.
Employee experience management software helps brands assess and track changes in the employee experience and employee engagement metrics over time, including measures such as belonging, happiness, recognition, leadership, enablement, alignment, development, sentiment, loyalty, and satisfaction.
Employee experience management platforms are able to evaluate employee engagement and other KPIs by leveraging insights from employee feedback surveys as well as other employee experience data from across sources — helpdesk and HR interactions, performance reviews, PTO and meetings attendance data, training and development platform data, customer interactions, and phone and messaging transcripts.
By combining internal data from across sources along with external data from social media and review platforms, brands are able to achieve a clear picture of the candidate experience, new hire experience, and overall employee experience as well as uncover steps that can be implemented to upgrade experiences based on employee feedback and insights across touchpoints and the entire employee lifecycle.
Plus, employee experience management software solutions include role-specific dashboards, views, and alerts so the right team members can be looped in about specific employee feedback and measures and take action right away. These tools can also be used to track progress against goal metrics and optimize for the greatest impact on business growth.
#3: AI-powered, predictive text and speech analytics
Bringing together employee experience data from across channels and sources is an undertaking, and so is analyzing all of these inputs — in real time, on an ongoing basis. That’s why companies with leading EX programs tap the power of AI-backed text analytics and speech analytics to do the job. These tools are capable of drawing meaning from expansive structured and unstructured data sets — such as open-ended employee feedback included in survey responses, online reviews, social media comments, and data from benefits and performance management systems — at scale. Offering real-time and continuous analysis, these tools can quickly identify emerging issues and trends that need to be fixed and addressed, allowing teams to spend their valuable time getting to the root cause, instead of sifting through mounds of data to find information.
Countless studies show an increasing preference among consumers and employees for video communications, but yet many businesses still rely on text-based surveys to gather employee feedback. However, advanced employee experience platforms offer the option for companies to collect video responses from the workforce from their computers or handheld devices as they’re on the go, making it easier for busy and deskless workers to provide their experiences in seconds.
No matter how streamlined an organization’s operations are or how satisfied their customers appear to be, no business is without its fair share of challenges — whether big or small — points of friction that stand in the way of driving longer employee tenure and deeper customer loyalty.
The good news is: Employees have ideas about how to address these underlying problems and enhance the employee and customer experience. The problem is, these suggestions often get lost amidst employee survey responses, 1:1 meetings, and all-hands meetings. Savvy companies harness the wisdom of their workforce using employee crowdsourcing platforms.
Designed to capture workers’ recommendations, these platforms can be leveraged to involve employees in the process of creating and implementing workable solutions that have a lasting impact. Including employees from the start will not only fuel innovation, it will also help boost morale — by giving workers a platform to express their ideas and feel heard.
The Top Benefits of Employee Experience Platforms
The costs associated with poor employee engagement and high employee churn can add up. Gallup estimates that when motivation and morale are low, companies lose out on the equivalent of 18% of every disengaged employee’s salary. A separate Gallup study finds that U.S. businesses lose out on $1 trillion each year as a result of employee turnover, due to the added expenses of having to find and train replacements. Given these sums, it’s clear that it’s well worth investing in the employee experience in general and in employee experience platforms that can help employers turn things around, refine experiences, and drive retention.
In fact, these are the main benefits of EX software solutions, strengthening employee, customer, and business outcomes.
#1: Measuring the employee experience
Employee experience platforms help organizations track employee experience metrics, like employee sentiment, employee loyalty, employee engagement, and employee retention.
Data-driven brands use EX tools to uncover high-priority focus areas that have the potential to have the greatest impact on employee outcomes.
#3: Elevating the employee experience
EX platforms shed light on how company policies, processes, and systems are affecting the team and what steps can be taken to boost employee well-being and sentiment, which can in turn enhance the customer experience.
#4: Driving employee engagement and loyalty
As leaders and managers implement changes to improve the EX, they can monitor the impact on employee KPIs to see what’s working and not and iterate to continue to optimize experiences.
#5: Reducing employee turnover and the cost of churn
Employee experience platforms can be leveraged to detect early signs of disengagement, when there’s still time to intervene, thereby lowering churn and the associated costs of recruiting, onboarding, and training new hires.
#6: Boosting customer satisfaction and retention
Well-designed EX platforms enable teams to identify the links between EX and the customer experience and pinpoint changes that can be made to improve both EX and CX.
Looking to improve your organization’s employee experience to drive engagement, retention, and other business outcomes? Meet with a Medallia expert to create a world class employee experience.
