How data-led insights can evolve your employee and customer experiences

John Balchin Head of Service Experience Linkedin Profile
How data-led insights can evolve your employee and customer experiences

Most organisational leaders know the importance of investing in both their employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) and the correlation that occurs between the two. In fact, evidence suggests that companies with a highly committed workforce can generate up to 4x the revenue of those without1, and engaged employees can be 21% more productive than their less engaged peers2.

Typically, if an employee is engaged, motivated, and equipped with the right tools, they are more likely to perform efficiently, provide outstanding customer service to your customers, and in general, deliver strong results for your organisation.

Likewise, this applies on the customer front too. Customers that receive a quality experience are more likely to be loyal, share their strategy and business needs, make more frequent /high-value purchases and 86% of the time are willing to pay more for a service if it means they will receive a great customer experience3.

So given the link between EX and CX, and the growing importance between the two, why is it that less than half of all organisations plan to invest in customer experience next year, and only 44% will increase the investment of their CX initiatives4.

Why is this happening? What’s missing?

There are all kinds of reasons why organisations are failing to provide optimal experiences for their employees and customers. In many cases, it can appear to be a ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario, with organisations lacking the measurement tools to realise that issues exist in the first place. Typically, most simply don’t have access to the CX or EX data they need – and many don’t know where to start when it comes to capturing or using this data to make improvements.

My suggestions, based on what I believe to be best practice within the industry is as follows:

Investment in tools and technology

It is crucial to invest heavily in technology solutions that will help you to monitor and measure your own CX and EX. When it comes to tracking customer satisfaction, utilising the right tools and systems that enable you to capture data throughout the customer lifecycle (including the billing stage, support tickets, as well as at regular points throughout the service) is an important step.

Implement a formal process

I urge all organisations to implement a formal process for capturing customer and employee feedback. For example, you could implement quarterly reviews as part of your customer satisfaction process, where you’d ask your customers to provide specific feedback regarding the overall performance of your products and services, as well as in specific areas across your organisation such as accuracy and promptness. This information is essential in helping business leaders understand where their organisation are/aren’t delivering, and which areas need re-focus to improve. It will also ensure that your people are delivering the best possible service and that the flow-on experience for your customers is the best it can be.

Next, taking all this data and inputting it into a Continual Service Improvement (CSI) tool and looking for themes or patterns that you can turn into insights that will enable your teams to make targeted changes needed to address key areas of concern.

Lastly, I strongly recommend implementing the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system as a form of measurement to help determine whether you are successfully providing a positive experience for your own customers. Since initiating this companywide form of measurement within Brennan IT five years ago, we’ve seen a steady increase in our own NPS by more than 10%, year on year – a solid indication that we’re doing something right!

Utilise employee insights and feedback

As previously mentioned, it is no secret that customer and employee satisfaction is intertwined. I really do believe that you cannot have a highly successful company and satisfied customers if you’re employees aren’t satisfied too. I therefore recommend you give your own employees an opportunity to call out any quality issues and to share their feedback based on their interactions with customers. An example of this could be using an employee survey to frequently measure staff satisfaction. Similar to the NPS method, I find that frequent and formal employee surveys can be particularly useful in helping to measure, identify trends, and analyse data. The other benefit of actively involving employees is that they end up championing a resolution on behalf of the client, and at the same time, help us to leverage our own ‘lessons learned’ methodology to continually analyse data and drive Customer Service Improvement (CSI) programs. Improvement initiatives resulting from these employee insights are then often driven by the impacted business unit, ensuring we focus on satisfying both the customer needs, but also making our employee’s life easier by addressing their needs to provide outstanding service.


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