When evaluating your company’s customer experience, the natural first move is to turn to your customers.
But what if you turned this thinking on its head and instead of looking outside you instead started internally and looked at your employees?
Over the years when looking at employee engagement scores and customer satisfaction scores I’ve learned that happy employees are most definitely more likely to deliver excellent CX. That means measuring employee engagement is a strong predictor of CX but the baffling factor is why HR and CX departments work in separate silos!
Of course, we would always recommend that your company carries out an employee engagement research project but if you want to measure your employee’s engagement it doesn’t always need to be a survey. You could look at absenteeism. Of course you want the metric to be low, but most importantly, WHY are people off work? Are they dissatisfied and if so, what can you do about it?
Another useful metric to look at is are employees doing extra voluntary work in their spare time, like charity work? People with a mindset geared towards helping others are more likely to go above and beyond to help customers too.
Finally, a strong indicator of employee engagement is advocacy: Are employees recommending your services to potential customers? If they’re willing to attach their own reputation to a company referral, it’s usually a positive sign for a strong culture which will no doubt deliver a strong customer experience to your customers.
Every company should carry out an annual employee engagement research survey but too often companies do it as a ‘tick box’ exercise and it ends up having a negative effect as employees don’t see any change as a result of their feedback. Employee engagement research not only strengthens your business’s overall CX, but having engaged staff results in greater productivity, reduced cost of recruitment, and develops a strong culture of mutual help.
How often do you evaluate your company’s employee engagement?