Survey says: Total experience-focused companies outperform

Now, more than ever, the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) are intertwined. Improving CX has a positive impact on EX, and vice versa. 

“Companies that excel at experience delivery don’t think of the two as separate,” notes Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow, in the Summer 2022 issue of Workflow Quarterly. “Instead, they align EX and CX to multiply the effects of each. Rather than tracking and improving one or the other, they’re looking for ways to do both at once.”

Indeed, organizations are aligning the two to create a positive total experience. To that end, 69% of 1,000 executives surveyed by ServiceNow and ThoughtLab have modernized their IT platforms. According to our respondents, this was the single most effective move to align customer and employee experience. 

Other steps include collecting customer and employee feedback, digitizing customer processes to boost employee productivity, and measuring how employee engagement affects customer retention (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1. Top steps organizations have taken to drive total experience effectiveness

Total experience benefits 

Greater revenue is the No. 1 advantage of aligning CX and EX, according to 60% of respondents. In addition, organizations benefit from better products and services, new business models, and improved reputation.

More specifically, organizations that embrace total experience tend to see: 

• Greater customer retention

• Higher-quality customer service

• Heightened ability to attract customers

• Improved data security and privacy for customers

Interestingly, these organizations also benefit from improved:

• Worker health and safety

• Employee data privacy

• Teamwork and collaboration

• Staff loyalty and retention
  
  

Overcoming resistance

As organizations look to embrace total experience more fully, they anticipate hiring or training talent to drive it, equipping staff with needed technology and data, and sharing data between customers and employees. 

Much work remains to be done. Although 42% of organizations already provide staff with needed technology and data, for example, the survey found only 10% of it has been effective. The biggest obstacle is employee resistance to change, acknowledged by half of the survey respondents. 

“Amazing tech won’t matter much if employees don’t use it,” Wright points out in his guest editor’s letter in Workflow Quarterly. 

Overcoming that barrier will require a mindset shift. “Every industry, from finance to healthcare to manufacturing, has to rethink itself,” says ThoughtLab Founder and CEO Lou Celi, who led the research study. “Management teams need to reimagine their companies as digital, rethink what they do for customers. They need to decide where digital can do the heavy lifting and where you need a human touch.”

Gain more insights in the Workflow Quarterly Summer 2022 issue. 

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