Your CX Data’s Missing Piece? Your Employees!

The next evolution of customer experience (CX) is here, and the brands that succeed will be those that invest in bringing together omnichannel experience insights across CX and employee experience (EX).

CX strategies have historically relied on customer feedback surveys to understand and optimize the customer experience. However, surveys don’t tell the full story, and not all customers are willing or able to participate. Even among those who want to share feedback, survey rates are declining. Instead, innovative leaders are getting ahead of the issue by focusing on capturing more insights from across sources and touchpoints. And they are realizing the most important source of all is their own employees.

Employees are the heart of the organization and the key source of ideas that elevate the business.

Traditionally, brands’ EX programs have focused on HR policies and procedures and optimizing the work environment. Those are all important, but we need to expand on this to also include all of the processes, systems, policies, teams, and resources that contribute to — or prevent — employees from doing their best work. All of these elements come together to impact not only the employee, but the customer. 

But at many organizations, EX and CX functions, strategies, and systems are siloed and unaligned.

Employees come to work because they want to be connected to a higher purpose. They want to apply their skills and knowledge to do something that matters to other people, whether that’s internal or external customers. To improve both employee and customer experience, organizations need to understand the obstacles employees are facing that are getting in the way of delivering on that purpose. Companies also need a way to capture employees’ ideas for solving these challenges in the moment, as issues arise. 

CX leaders rely heavily on customer survey feedback, and because they don’t have employee listening tools, they only get a fraction of the story.

As Medallia Experience ‘25 keynote speaker Denise Lee Yohn, brand leadership expert and author of the bestselling books What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest and FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies, shared in her address in Las Vegas, many efforts to improve CX fail to produce results because they overlook an important element: the company culture.

“Culture is actually what enables you to win, because in business, as in gambling, playing the long game requires more than tactics. Playing the long game in customer experience requires employee engagement,” she explains. “So in other words, if you are only working on customer experience, you are only working on half the equation or playing with a half a deck of cards.”

Organizations need to embrace a new way of operating that places employee empowerment at the center of their business strategy.

Most often, when people think about bringing EX and CX together, they think about looking for a correlation between customer NPS® and employee engagement. However, connecting EX and CX to impact business outcomes needs to go deeper than a simple correlation. That’s because it’s rare to find any relationship in the data because of methodological issues and, even when companies do find it, what’s next? The data alone offers no insight about what action to take.

Instead, the most impactful way to connect EX and CX is to empower employees to share issues that are impacting their ability to do their job and serve customers.

Giving employees the opportunity to provide feedback will unlock new ideas that fuel action and business growth.

Customer experience issues often begin with employee experience challenges that go unnoticed and unresolved.  

That’s why organizations benefit from continuously listening to their employees to learn about the challenges they’re encountering throughout the day, using tools and strategies like employee crowdsourcing, anytime listening, and employee activation embedded within their daily workflows

Take the example of a Medallia customer that could see that their customers were frustrated by long queues in their bank branches. When the brand looked at their employee data, they saw branch employees were flagging issues they were encountering when using a new system. Processes that used to take seconds were now taking minutes — and that slowdown was creating long lines and leading to a poor in-branch experience. Once the bank listened to both their customers and their employees, they had a complete picture of what was going on and stakeholders were able to make the changes necessary to improve experiences all around.

Employees have the potential to offer organizations much needed insight, knowledge, and ideas, but they aren’t given the opportunity to share their thoughts as often as is necessary to make a timely impact. Medallia research on companies with leading employee experience programs has found that leaders are 3.5 times more likely to obtain feedback from their employees on a monthly basis, while most EX laggards (54.1%) only check in with their workforce once a year or less. Leaders are about twice as likely to have always-on feedback in place to capture whatever employees want to share compared with laggards. (And the evidence speaks for itself: EX leaders are 12 times more likely to experience revenue growth, more likely to exceed their financial targets, and more likely to accomplish high levels of customer satisfaction and retention compared to laggards.)

Gathering employee insights shouldn’t happen once or twice a year — it needs to become a regular operating practice and a fundamental part of doing business.

Category leaders stand out from their competitors by not only listening to and responding to their customers’ needs in the moment — but to their employees, too. 

They do this by integrating feedback opportunities into their team members’ daily routines, such as via the company’s intranet, app, or Slack or Teams, and using Text Analytics to analyze that feedback, easily uncovering the root cause of issues that are having an impact on CX, and automatically notifying the appropriate team members about relevant issues, whether they’re a part of facilities, IT, HR, marketing, or another department. 

The ultimate promise of bringing EX and CX insights together? Going from reactive to proactive decision-making to remove friction faster.

As brands look to expand their omnichannel insights gathering, they can’t afford to leave out employee signals. As I said before, and it bears repeating: Your people are your best source of CX insights. After all, they are at the center of every customer experience. By bringing in the employee voice alongside your broader omnichannel insights, you can detect and solve problems faster, prevent issues, improve both the employee and customer experience, and drive better business outcomes.

Medallia has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: EX Management Platforms For Large Enterprises, QX 2025, which evaluated 12 companies based on 23 criteria. Learn more about Medallia’s ranking and our industry-leading solution and services in the full report.