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HR has been no stranger to borrowing concepts from other business departments or realms of society over the years.
Operating models such as agile HR are borrowed from the world of IT and product design; people analytics principles from data science teams; and even Elmo has offered an unexpectedly useful perspective on mental health at work.
This is undoubtedly a healthy business practice. Looking to other departments can bring fresh inspiration and innovation to the problems plaguing HR leaders, and customer experience (CX) is no exception.
The world of CX benefits from a level of maturity that offers several lessons to employee experience (EX) professionals. “We shouldn’t feel a need to reinvent the wheel, particularly on how we measure success,” says Bryan Vermes, Director of Employee Experience and Communication at Mimecast. “We see that companies will go to great lengths to listen to their customers and understand their challenges. There’s no reason that we can’t do the same for our employees – Whether through surveys, engaging with our alumni, or focus groups. We have tools available to us that have been proven to work and can be used internally.”
Complaints, community, and co-creation: What EX can learn from CX
Indeed, there is a huge amount of infrastructure in place to make sure customer complaints, frustrations, and issues are heard and acted upon swiftly.
In well-functioning CX teams, all feedback, be it good or bad, is systematically gathered, stored, analyzed, and fed back into product design or strategy.
Employees consistently report frustrations that their feedback is not heard, understood, or acted on. Creating dedicated teams - and supporting these teams with the necessary tools to store and translate employee complaints into insights that HR leaders can feed into their people strategy, helping employees to feel that their frustrations are being resolved.
“The same principles, approaches, and technologies that enable delightful customer experiences can also be applied to deliver delightful employee experiences,” says Erin Liman, Director of Employee Experience Design at Autodesk. “When employees feel cared for, they are better equipped to pay it forward as they in turn care for colleagues, partners, and customers. This human-centered approach fosters empathy, care, and value in each interaction, building trust and loyalty.”
But for the most impactful CX teams, there has been a shift away from reactive customer service to proactive customer success. By focusing on building a community around customers, the world’s leading brands are creating remarkable value. Take McDonald’s ‘Famous Orders’ campaign. The fast-food giant tapped into customer co-creation with the help of celebrity fans like Travis Scott, offering replica orders from these superstars alongside menu hacks from generic customers. The result? McDonald’s bucked consistent year-on-year declines in sales and increased its revenue by 10.4% from 2018 to 2021. By proactively tapping into customer experiences and feeding it back into its branding, it realized the benefits of community and co-creation.
In the case of B2B organizations, which may feel a little more familiar to HR professionals, consider working with an HRIS, LMS, or recruitment software provider whose customer success team is in regular contact across the entirety of the service development and delivery cycles. They make sure your organization is getting the best out of the platform, help you drive adoption, and take on your feedback for product or feature development ideas. Now compare this to a vendor that only responds to address major complaints for issues that have already occurred or that only checks in just before the contract is up for renewal.
Reactive customer service alone is simply not good enough compared with the proactive approach. Back in the world of HR, there is a valuable lesson in the need for EX co-creation.
Whether it’s a complaint or a rave, Liman finds that feedback signals passion and alignment with expectations and provides an opportunity to improve EX and build relationships. “Taking a collaborative approach to understanding the problem statement can reveal perspectives we haven't considered and help us understand the scale of an issue,” she explains. “Many experience failures occur in the gaps between functions or because business processes are oriented from the function and system perspective rather than the employee's point of view. By stepping into the employee’s shoes and viewing the experience from their lens, we can co-create a more seamless employee experience.”
Establishing structured opportunities for idea co-creation gives employees a chance to directly influence the root cause of many of their frustrations, rather than just vent into the void of unaddressed complaints.
The customer employee is always right, right?
Drawing this approach from the world of CX also gives the ‘fans’ of your organization the chance to talk about what they love about working for you. Part of CX is acknowledging the customer isn’t always right. You can’t win over every critic. Nor can you resolve every complaint that employees have. It simply isn’t realistic or worth the time of otherwise busy EX team members or people managers, and becoming bogged down in fire-fighting limits the opportunity for deeper EX strategy.
Of course, employee feedback should always be taken seriously, especially formal complaints for issues such as harassment, but there’s a balance between reactively addressing employee frustrations, and proactively creating truly outstanding EX journeys.
Joey Coleman, Chief Experience Composer at Design Symphony, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of Never Lose an Employee Again, believes this is a crucial difference between the current focus of CX and EX teams. “CX for years now has talked about making the customer journey remarkable,” he explains. “In EX, at most organizations, it has been more about making sure people show up at work on time and make sure they do the job they're supposed to do. It's been more reactionary and more driven towards achieving certain behaviors as opposed to achieving certain feelings.”
The biggest opportunity, suggests Coleman, is to ask, “what are the actual feelings that we want our employees to have? What is the journey that we want to take them on? How can we systematize touch points and interactions across that journey in the same way we might with a customer navigating a customer life cycle?”
Just as McDonald’s created a platform for fans of the brand to share their positive experiences, EX teams should be truly intentional about taking their customers on a journey and knowing the next logical step for each employee to increase their personal and emotional connection to our organization. For McDonald’s, it helped drive revenue. In the case of HR teams, it can help drive an outstanding EX that will build retention, attract top-level talent, and drive engagement across the board.
