The Future of Customer and Employee Experience
No.135: Mon 6 Mar 2023
Hi, it’s David here.
This week Jed shares his learnings from our Customer Experience Lunch and Learn presented last week by our resident expert in Customer Experience Charlotte 'CLo' Lo .
These sessions which we offer to our clients are a way for us to share new ways of thinking on new problems and currently we are building them in to a curriculum for a marketing cohort.
It's a way for us to share our thinking and give our clients the BeenThereDoneThat Experience.
As always, we are curious to hear what you think.
David Alberts (Co-Founder and Chief Vision Officer at BeenThereDoneThat)
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Hi, it’s Jed here.
At BeenThereDoneThat one of the most important learnings I have been able to implement into my everyday life is to be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. There’s that great quote, ‘If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re probably in the wrong room’.
Last week, Charlotte ‘CLo’ Lo, our Independent CX Partner (CCXP) and CX/EX Partner at BeenThereDoneThat, presented a lunch and learn to our internal team about the future of customer and employee experience. I felt like an imbecile the whole time and it couldn’t have been a more fantastic use of the hour.
These lunch and learns are always informative and provide great value, so it makes total sense that moving forward I’ll have the pleasure of sharing my key takeaways from this session, as well as from those in the future. Let’s get into it…
It’s no secret that customer and employee experience play a crucial role in the success of a business. CLo discussed the importance of both CX and EX, properly defined what successful CX and EX looks like, and detailed how companies can improve their experiences for both customers and employees.
What is Customer Experience (CX)?
There's a lot of different definitions of what CX means in the market today. These range from branding and marketing agencies, focusing on the brand activation side of things, as well as the core customer experience industry, where it's all about looking at the actual experience and the actual sort of hard-working bits of experience beyond sales.
According to the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), customer experience (CX) refers to the perception that customers have of an organization, based on interactions across all touchpoints, people, and technology over time. This includes all interactions with a company, from the first impression to post-sales support.
What is Employee Experience (EX)?
Gartner defines employee experience as the way employees internalize and interpret the interactions they have with the organization, along with the context that underlies those interactions. Employee engagement is a good measure of EX. How engaged and how aligned do people feel with where they are on their career journey and versus the company vision? And how well equipped do they feel to achieve that?
A positive employee experience can lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity, which in turn can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Why is CX and EX Important?
CLo explained that the focus on customer experience will become the primary differentiator in the next 5 years, surpassing price and product. With global spend on CX increasing, companies that prioritize CX will have a strategic advantage over their competition. Great CX/EX not only brings brands and people closer together through real insight and empathy, but also opens up a whole new world of creative and innovation opportunities as well as new revenue streams. Additionally, happy customers and employees leads to more growth for a business and long term love for brands.
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Customer Experience Pyramid and Products
CLo presented Forrester's customer experience pyramid and suggested that companies should aim for “enjoyable and desirable” experiences that bring the brand’s purpose to life, anchored by customer needs. At BeenThereDoneThat we are developing four products to help clients improve their CX and EX: brand and CX ecosystem audit, Idea Ecosystem, CX Transformation, and EX Transformation. These products aim to identify gaps and opportunities, create a North Star CX vision, drive customer-centricity and empathy, and activate customer-led product creation. If you think these might be useful to aid any struggles you are experiencing around EX and/or CX, drop us a note by replying to this!
Ultimately, I left the session feeling that CX and EX are essential for business success, and companies that prioritize these experiences will have a strategic advantage over their competition moving forwards. And at BeenThereDoneThat it seems that everyone is aligned and on board with that view, which is great for our personal EX and will be great for our CX as we put the finishing touches on these four products that will, in turn, help our clients improve their CX and EX.
I’ll leave you with what I believe is the most critical takeaway and will help you to get the ball rolling… The key to improving CX and EX is to initiate conversations about the current state of matters as it will open up opportunities for improvement when mapping the customer and employee journeys.
If you’re interested in learning more about this session, drop us a message. We’d love to learn about what you do and how we might be able to help.
As always, we are curious to hear what you think.
Jed Alberts (Global Marketing Manager at BeenThereDoneThat)
Supporting Articles
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