Why Brands Need to Connect CX and EX

Why Brands Need to Connect CX and EX

Our industry experts share why aligning customer experience and employee experience contributes to business growth.

Connecting your company’s customer experience (CX) with your employee experience (EX) across data-sharing, strategy building, and decision-making is a winning strategy. Organizations that align their employee and customer efforts are better positioned to deliver on their brand promise, create emotional engagement among employees, foster brand loyalty among customers, and enable more strategic actions. 

A Holistic Approach to CX and EX

When employees feel valued and engaged with the business, they are naturally inclined to deliver exceptional customer experiences. This alignment builds loyalty, improves satisfaction, and drives growth, creating a ripple effect of positive outcomes across the organization. Ignoring any part of this ecosystem creates disjointed experiences and weakens the brand’s impact.

To fully achieve this alignment, you need executive buy-in for prioritizing CX and EX. Here are our experts’ tips for what to pitch to a hesitant executive to get them on board.

1. You’ll rediscover your brand’s legacy and better align your brand’s aspirations with reality

What has made your brand so great in the first place? “If you connect your customer and employee experience insights, you’ll find out what’s led to your successes,” says Mike Debnar, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Retail at Medallia, who previously led customer experience and digital innovation at 7-Eleven. 

Hint: It’s your employees. They’re the ones delivering your brand promise and core values to create great customer experiences. “By connecting CX and EX, you gain a clearer picture of the role your team plays in building your brand mythology,” he explains.

“There’s a downside to not bringing CX and EX together,” warns Geoffrey Ryskamp, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Hospitality at Medallia, who has held management and operational roles with Hilton Worldwide, Marriott International, and more. He explains that there is a risk of developing a mismatch between the brand’s promise and the actual experience that ends up being delivered. A disjointed approach creates dissatisfaction and undermines trust. 

“This happens when you create a brand promise, but your employees aren’t empowered, trained, or excited to deliver on it — and that feels like whiplash to customers, and even worse, to the employees,” he says. “Conversely, when your employees feel valued, empowered, and supported, they are more likely to go above and beyond with customers, and that leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and, ultimately, business growth.”

2. You have a better chance to create emotional engagement and foster loyalty

When CX and EX are connected, brands have the opportunity to elevate employees’ emotional connection to the business by enabling stronger alignment with the brand’s values and mission, according to Melissa Arronte, PhD, VP, Executive Advisor for Employee Experience at Medallia, who previously served as a leader in HR and analytics at Liberty Mutual Insurance and Citizens Bank. When that happens, better customer experiences and sustainable business growth follow. 

Debnar adds that companies with high employee turnover rates fail to get traction with connecting CX and EX. Meanwhile, the brands we all know and love invest in their employees — who in turn become invested in the customer experience. 

Similarly, a recent Medallia Market Research loyalty study found that one attribute that makes customers loyal is when they can detect that a company’s employees are treated well.

3. You can enable better decision-making across the organization

Amber Maraccini, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Healthcare at Medallia, who has held experience leadership roles at Renown Health and worked as a clinical assistant professor at the University of Nevada, says the number one thing she would encourage the C-suite of healthcare organizations to do is to create a patient advisory council that sits on the company’s executive and quality leadership committees to involve customer voices in decision-making. 

She also notes that healthcare organizations that unify their experience data from the patient and employee side of healthcare can use these combined approaches to more effectively address employee issues, such as turnover, that are impacting the quality of care being delivered and leading to declines in patient safety outcomes and an increase in adverse patient events.

Judy Bloch, Vice President and Executive Advisor for Financial Services at Medallia, who has held customer experience leadership roles at Sprint, Citi, and UMB, adds that there’s real value in using employee crowdsourcing platforms to gather your team’s input about how to improve the customer experience — these suggestions could lead to your company’s next product, service, or operational innovation that fosters even greater customer loyalty. 


Want to take the next step in bringing your customer experience and employee experience programs together? Set up time with a Medallia Expert. We help the world’s top brands become category leaders by maximizing their CX and EX strategies and outcomes.


Author

Mary Kearl

A graduate of NYU with a BA in journalism and Baruch College Zicklin School of Business with an MBA in marketing, Mary Kearl is a writer and digital marketer professional whose work has been published by Business Insider, Forbes, and more. When she's not writing about the latest in customer and employee experiences and engagement, you will most likely find her at the beach.
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