Here’s what CX and EX leaders do in order to provide the best customer experience and the best employee experience.
Turns out, companies with the best customer experience and employee experience strategies have a lot in common. For starters, both employee and customer experience leaders are more likely to achieve revenue growth, exceed their financial goals, and earn high marks for employee and customer satisfaction, according to two key research studies from the Medallia Institute.
The findings, available in Uncovering the Secrets Behind a Successful Customer Experience Program and Moving Toward Employee Experience Excellence, are the result of an analysis conducted of the customer experience programs of over 580 brands and a separate survey of over 680 human resource and employee experience (EX) professionals. As part of these studies, we gathered insights from customer experience (CX) and employee professionals and leaders in related fields representing organizations with more than 100 employees based primarily in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, New Zealand, and Australia.
What we discovered from these initiatives reveals what sets top performers (‘leaders’) from those at the bottom (‘laggards’) when it comes to employee experience and customer experience.
Current Investment in Customer Experience & Employee Experience
As Medallia research highlights, investing in customer experience and employee experience strategies can be incredibly valuable for organizations. Yet, many businesses only prioritize one practice or the other. And among those that have established both customer experience programs and employee experience programs, many operate these in silos. In the past, we’ve demonstrated the value of bringing customer and employee experience data together, discussed how customer experience equals employee experience, and shared how brands including State Farm, Birchbox, Brooklinen, Proper Cloth, Vanguard, and the City of San Diego are working to align their CX and EX efforts to customer satisfaction and improve employee engagement.
Let’s explore the top factors that differentiate companies with the best customer experience and employee experience, and how bringing the best of CX and EX together can help your organization deliver stronger results.
4 Strategic Best Practices That Set CX & EX Leaders Apart
Want to learn from companies with the best customer experience and employee experience? Take a cue from the top employee and customer experience leaders we surveyed, and put these four tactics to use in your organization.
#1: Set customer experience and employee experience goals
From our research, we found that leaders in both customer experience and employee experience not only set experience goals throughout the entire organization but also communicate how these goals align with the overall strategy, demonstrating the strategic nature of experience goals in supporting business performance.
Specifically, customer experience leaders are 2.5 times as likely as laggards to strongly agree that they communicate how customer experience aligns with the overall strategy (43% vs. 17%). Over 75% of companies with the best customer experience agree or strongly agree that employees at their organization have goals supporting CX.
Nearly half of employee experience leaders we surveyed report having employee experience goals in place throughout the organization and that they communicate how these goals align with their company’s overall strategy.
#2: Collect direct feedback from customers and employees
Employee experience leaders collect direct feedback from their teams more often than laggards and are 3.5 times more likely to obtain feedback at least monthly. To capture these insights, employee experience leaders use:
- A variety of different methods, whether through comprehensive employee experience surveys, pulses, questions about discrete interactions, or always-available surveys. Specifically, leaders use any combination of these modes more than laggards.
- A range of channels to capture employee feedback, such as email, text, paper, and digital. Employee experience leaders use 1.9 channels, compared to laggards, who use 1.4.
Structured and unstructured data to understand the employee experience. Beyond soliciting and capturing direct feedback, employee experience leaders excel at leveraging unsolicited, unstructured data, such as online comments, call transcripts, or responses to open-ended survey questions, to understand what’s on employees’ minds.
Similarly, customer experience leaders use more channels to capture customer insights — leveraging 3.3 feedback channels, compared with only 2.4 channels for laggards. Companies with the best customer experience are also 2.5 times more likely to say they have enough data to understand the experience of customers in key segments and 3.3 times more likely than laggards to prioritize the quantity of customer feedback they gather.
#3: Measure the impact of your customer experience and employee experience strategies
Customer experience leaders are 2.4 times more likely to link the impact of CX-related actions to financial performance than laggards, and 3 times more likely to conduct either a cost-benefit or return-on-investment analysis on CX investments to evaluate them.
What’s more, EX leaders are 1.8 times more likely to have practices to measure and analyze the impact of their initiatives than laggards and 1.7 times more likely to have data sharing practices to democratize access to these insights.
Not surprisingly, we find that both employee and customer experience leaders are more likely to show strong financial performance. We find that the odds of reporting revenue growth of at least 20% in the past year is (compared to laggards):
- 26 times higher for CX leaders
- 12 times higher for EX leaders
#4: Invest in both customer experience and employee experience
In our Moving Toward Employee Experience Excellence report, we found that top EX performers also deliver standout results on CX outcomes, such as customer satisfaction and retention. And, in our Secrets Behind a Successful Customer Experience Program report, we found that customer experience leaders perform strongly when it comes to EX outcomes, such as employee satisfaction and retention, underscoring the strong link between customer experience and employee experience.
Here are some of the key findings from our research that support the connection between CX and EX:
- Customer experience leaders are 2.8 times more likely to be viewed as a great place to work
- Employee experience leaders are 1.8 times more likely to accomplish high levels of customer satisfaction and retention compared to laggards
The Best Companies Combine CX & EX to Achieve Success
The best companies compete not only on their customer experience but on employee experience, too. And companies with the best customer experience and employee experience achieve success by establishing clear experience goals, collecting feedback to understand how they’re meeting the needs of their employees and customers in the moment, measuring the impact of their initiatives over time, and by leveraging the best of both CX and EX strategies to fuel greater satisfaction and loyalty among customers and employees.
For more insights on what customer experience and employee experience leaders are doing right, check out our reports: Uncovering the Secrets Behind a Successful Customer Experience Program and Moving Toward Employee Experience Excellence.
