The Customer Experience Grows From The Employee Experience

Employees of a coffee shop

The Employee Experience
The Customer Experience Grows From The Employee Experience

Engaged employees are the soil and nutrients in which your Customer Experience grows.

We like to refer to the overall Employee Experience as EX and the Customer Experience as CX. As stated in the book, The Employee Experience: How to Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers, and Drive Results, “To create a sustainable, world-class CX, an organization must first create a sustainable, world-class Employee Experience, or in other words:

EX = CX

It all begins with your employees. Creating a wonderful, profit-boosting Customer Experience is like gardening. You can’t order up the results you want––healthy plants––just by waiving your hand. Gardening is a process-based activity; you attend to the components that create the desired outcome and then hope for the best. That means using soil amendments, watering, and weeding. The gardener can’t do much more than that, but if he or she does it well, the odds of a strong, plentiful harvest are high.

Read the Book: The Employee Experience

Growing an organization works in the same way. Success comes through quality products, sensible pricing, strong customer support, and employees who care personally about delivering an extraordinary experience every time. When an organization creates a top-notch Employee Experience, the likelihood of a superior Customer Experience increases exponentially. When Employee Experience is poor, chances are the customer will see the effects.

Your employees are the soil and nutrients in which your Customer Experience grows. If you have a workforce of engaged people who feel respected and appreciated, and if they trust their leaders enough to take risks and invest emotionally in the organization, your Customer Experience will take care of itself.

Conversely, if you don’t have that foundation of great people who care about providing a terrific experience and making customers’ lives better, all the technology and systems in the world won’t keep your Customer Experience from being a money-losing mess.

What is the Law of Congruent Experience?

Employees of a coffee shop

Employee Experience: Law of Congruent Experience

What is the Law of Congruent Experience?

Employees will deliver a Customer Experience that matches their own experience in the organization.

Employees are the face of your brand. They’re on the front lines and in direct contact with your customers. Sure, customers are also seeing your website, marketing, and real estate, but those do not outweigh a salesperson who goes out of her way to solve a problem or a school counselor who stays late to help a student with college scholarship forms. Consumers are human, and humans intuitively respond to human interactions more than they do slogan, packaging, or discounts.
 

Read the Book: The Employee Experience

That’s why the Employee Experience (EX) has far more potential than the Customer Experience (CX) to move the needle for your organization, by whatever metric you choose: revenue, growth, retention, customer satisfaction scores, number of students registered, patient satisfaction, and so on. But putting Employee Experience before Customer Experience also serves as a way to prevent your organization from diving down expensive, time-consuming rabbit holes.

Think about the costs, financial and otherwise, of implementing a Customer Experience management program where employees’ hearts and minds aren’t fully engaged. Some organizations spend a fortune on elaborate customer service safety nets designed to keep employees from damaging the customer relationship. Why? Because their employees don’t care. They’re having a lousy experience, so they’re not motivated to provide anything more than that to the customer. We call this the Law of Congruent Experience.
Get the book, The Employee Experience