Customer experience leaders financially outperform laggards. Forrester Research calculates the advantage at 14%. While almost every company is chasing the CX hype cycle, many forget who creates and manages those experiences: employees. Here’s why you should also invest in the worker experience, including the ROI of doing so.
Your employees are highly connected in their personal lives through a variety of digital, mobile, and social channels. But they’re often forced to revert back to old technology at work. Peter Hinsseen describes the situation as:
Outside of work, employees live in the 21st century, but they go to work in the 20th century. This is likely a contributing factor to why only one-third of employees are actually engaged at work. So how can disenfranchised employees working with 20th-century technology create 21st-century customer experiences? They can’t.
Workers Deserve a Better Experience
According to the 2017 State of IT report, an overwhelming majority of employees want their companies to provide them with the same level of technology they experience in their personal lives. They need an internal infrastructure that fosters engagement, productivity, and agility. These workers deserve an experience that is:
Responsive
Don’t force your employees to search multiple systems. Deliver the best information from across your enterprise’s ecosystem of record inside each of the engagement platforms your employees use.
Proactive
Don’t wait for the question to be asked. Automatically suggest related and contextual information based on who the employee is and what they are working on.
Predictive
Leverage predictive analytics and machine learning to constantly analyze what has worked well for others. Offer insights based on the wisdom of the crowd.
The ROI on Worker Experience
Most companies struggle to quantify the value of the worker experience. Some companies haven’t recognized the correlation between the worker and customer experience. CX programs can’t work without a group of talented and engaged employees driving them. Pairing the two together thrusts the worker experience discussion to executive levels because it is aligned to the highly popular and financially rewarding customer experience topic.
As Nicole Kemp with Appirio so wisely said while referencing the “don’t put the cart before the horse” analogy: “Think of the horse as your workers and the cart as your customers. If you don’t take good care of your horse (worker experience)…it won’t pull your cart (customer experience) very far.”
Powerful Results
Offering a worker experience that is responsive, proactive, and predictive has yielded powerful results for companies.
HERSHEY’S recently presented their strategy at KMWorld. After indexing a variety of different data and content sources, employees receive recommendations of resident experts along with the best content for specific topics, all based on analytics that identifies relevancy by user behavior and context, not just job titles and rules. Hershey’s stock has since increased 10%.
My client AECOM built a mobile first Intranet application for its 80,000 employees and consultants around the world. With unified access to a variety of different knowledge repositories, both internal and external, knowledge is proactively pushed to each employee at various steps within the engineering project management processes. AECOM’s stock price is up 30% since deploying this solution.
These are just a few powerful examples. More are available in the Guide to Building an Intelligent Workplace eBook.
Just remember, a successful customer experience is enabled by an effective worker experience.
For more information on the correlation between your employees and customers, please read The Worker Shapes the Customers’ Experience eBook from Forrester Research and Appirio.
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