Empowering customers and employees through digital experience

The pandemic has made clear that businesses can’t work in silos anymore. That reality extends to customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). The path to success is integration between the two to create a total digital experience, because happy employees produce happy customers.

“The employee and customer experience are like a mobius strip or infinite loop. They are interconnected,” explains Dean Robison, senior vice president of customer service and support at ServiceNow, in a recent Workflow article.

Benefits of total experience

The benefits of a total experience approach fall in three key areas, according to ServiceNow-sponsored research by ESI ThoughtLab and reported in the Workflow Quarterly Summer 2021 issue: financial, organizational, and customer/employee. Of the 900 senior-level executives surveyed:

• 45% reported higher revenue from merging CX and EX.
• 36% noted better organizational decision-making.
• 22% found a combined approach attracts customers.

Further benefits include increased market share and lower capital costs, improved organizational health and safety, and better products and services.

Perhaps that’s why half of the survey respondents are making large or very large investments in total experience, linking CX and EX. “Creating a cohesive total experience reduces the drag, cost, and redundancy of serving both internal and external stakeholders,” according to ESI ThoughtLab’s analysis of the results.

The need for improved IT platforms

Getting your company to embrace total experience isn’t necessarily easy. Survey respondents agreed modern, improved IT platforms are a prerequisite. In fact, more than half of the companies represented named modernizing IT platforms their top priority in the next two years.

Digital platforms such as the Now Platform enable digital workflows that connect front, middle, and back-office functions, eradicating silos.

Other ways companies are investing in the total experience include digitizing CX, providing staff with technology and data, integrating EX and CX, acquiring talent, and including employees in CX design (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Top total experience steps taken now vs. 1-2 years. Source: ESI ThoughtLab

Toward experience maturity

Improving the overall experience is fraught with challenges, but they’re not insurmountable. The survey found these challenges subside as companies mature their CX and EX initiatives. Here’s how to start merging your CX and EX:

1. Create an experience strategy and roadmap.
2. Design an experience that puts people at the center.
3. Build the right team with the right skills.
4. Get real-time feedback and sentiment analysis.
5. Design low-code apps for faster innovation.

Following these steps can lead to big payoffs—for your customers, your employees, and your business.

Get more insights in the Workflow Quarterly Total Experience issue. To stay abreast of emerging tech and business trends, subscribe to the Workflow newsletter.