Defining and Driving Return on Experience (ROX) Impact to Your Brand (Part 2)
The first step in building the discipline of employee experience and changing to employee centricity is to help your leadership understand the relationship and business impact of employee and customer experience. Focus on creating an example (like the one in my previous blog post) and develop a business case for your leaders.
This can take many forms, but to prove out why employee experience is a worthwhile investment, be sure to clearly explain the current gaps and inefficiencies in employee experience, and how this ties back to the customer experience and the brand’s bottom line.
- Create a cross-functional team – With support from your executives, charter a cross-functional team that has deep, lasting knowledge of the processes, programs, and frameworks that make your brand tick. Focus on understanding the current employee experience: What do you know about your employees today? How long are they staying? Why are they leaving? What pain points, challenges, and barriers do they face on a day-to-day basis? Conduct interviews, review previous employee surveys, and gather as much information as you can about their experience.
- Map the employee journey – After the data collection phase is complete, it’s time to create an employee journey map This should be a comprehensive representation of what a typical employee goes through every day and in their work environment – their hurdles, frustrations, and needs. A critical component of this mapping should be identifying where the employee journey links to, and impacts the customer experience journey.
- Prioritize – Next, identify potential opportunities to redesign the highest-friction experiences that many of your employees face, or where they need empowerment, data, tools, resources, and leadership to enable their success. To pinpoint where to start, perform a quick impact and value analysis. Which opportunity, if solved, would make the most impact and be most valuable to them and the brand? Identify some quick wins and create a roadmap to tackle the other opportunities.
- Purposeful Design – You’ve determined what opportunities to start with, discovered the right issues to solve, now you need to design the new experience. Put plans in place to fix the problem. This critical step focuses on ensuring that the design of an experience is done intentionally, and addresses specific goals aimed at creating lasting business value through experience. When you’re done implementing the changes, tell your story. Highlight the tangible and intangible results you expect to receive from that project (or several projects) to build momentum, demonstrate the results of improving their experience and capture the impact the changes have on your customer. Caution: Don’t just focus on metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT/ESAT (Customer or Employee Satisfaction). Ensure your project measures impacts such as increase productivity, reducing cost to serve or acquisition, number of additional services sold. These translate directly to distinct financial results.
- Pilot – Use an initial or pilot experience approach as the basis to design an ongoing discipline that introduces systematic changes to continually make your employee experience better. Build outvalue cases and demonstrate how employee experience creates strong engagement for your employees, and how it has a cascading effect on improving customer experience.
- Incorporate the Discipline – Build an ongoing voice of employee and create ways for them to participate in innovating the experience by providing input into the solutions. Build out ways to test and iterate on what’s working and what’s not. Focus on the impact and deliberately put structure in place that enables your brand to systematically make changes while continually improving employee experience.
Positive results require a commitment to identifying and improving on the employee experience with the same rigor you apply to customer experience. Identifying and creating a series of programmatic changes and investments that deliver meaningful impact come as a result of engaging employees and customers.
At the core, it is about building an approach to support continuously improving experience in the entire ecosystem of your brand. This central approach will not only drive business results, but also helps with agility, collaboration, and innovation so your culture and brand can grow and thrive in this dynamically changing world.
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Diane Magers is a Certified Customer Experience Professional, CCXP and the Founder and CEO of Experience Catalysts. She is also Emeritus Chair & recent CEO of CXPA.
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Join us to learn more about CX & ROI in our webinar next week. Our FREE webinar will take place on March 31st, at 4-5 PM Finnish time (EEST), 2-3 PM UK (GMT+1), 8-9 AM (CST)