Creating a positive experience for both customers and employees is essential for remaining competitive in the contact center industry. Customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) are closely related, and work to create a synergetic effect with the proper union of everyone within the contact center. Customers who receive excellent experiences from a business continue to buy goods and services from that business; meanwhile, employees who enjoy their work remain engaged in their duties.

contact center CX & EX | agents in call center

Experience Prioritization

Marketing analyst Gartner reports that 89 percent of businesses are currently planning on competing primarily based on CX. This process generally requires a rigorous analysis of prior experiences to optimize each touchpoint for customers as they make their journey toward a sale. Today’s businesses must prioritize their customers’ needs in every interaction if those customers are to become loyal promoters for the business. Executives have traditionally devoted company resources to customers before employees as a means of delivering long-term value to shareholders.

Take Continental Airlines for example. In the early 2000s, the company was coming out of bankruptcy. In prior years, the company had focused on the customer experience, but in this difficult time, they instead decided to take a different approach to move forward. They focused on their people and the benefits and perks they offered to create a positive employee experience. This in turn reaped huge rewards for Continental Airlines. Their people were happier and providing award-winning customer service, which resulted in the airline receiving national recognition. It’s a great success story (even though they eventually merged with United Airlines in later years).

Executives like Sir Richard Branson also recognize that businesses should reverse this outdated practice. Branson believes that it’s impossible for an organization to deliver distinguished CX when it actively assigns its employees a lower priority for resource allocation. The intended effect of this shift is employees who have a higher level of motivation to treat customers the way they are being treated by their employer.

Employee Experience

Contact center CX & EX | Happy team high-fiving

Employee experience (EX) includes an employee’s interaction with customers as well as coworkers and supervisors. It arises from the notion that satisfied employees are essential for delivering brand value to the customer. EX goes beyond traditional Human Resource Management (HRM) by rewarding employees with both personal and professional development.

Organizations have been actively working to improve their CX for decades, but EX is a new focus in the experience economy. Employees who become disengaged from their roles are detrimental to CX, as a result of increased absenteeism and an overall decline in performance. These problems create a cascading effect if an organization continues to treat its employees as an afterthought, which is especially likely to result in the loss of high performers. By shifting their focus to employee engagement, executives can address this growing problem and advance their organizations CX simultaneously.

The Relationship Between CX and EX

Forbes reports that an undeniable link exists between CX and EX since employees are often a major untapped resource for improving the customer experience. The employees of EX leaders like Adobe, GE, and Zappos have 60 percent greater engagement, resulting in higher levels of productivity and innovation. Organizations that strategically allocate resources for improving EX are four times more profitable and 25 percent smaller, according to The Employee Experience Advantage. Companies that focus on EX are also twice as likely to appear in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, suggesting that putting employees first may be the best way to deliver world-class CX.

In summary, a person’s experience with others can have a profound effect on their attitudes and morale in the workplace. EX and CX are distinct types of experience, but they’re similar in terms of the benefits they can provide for your organization. Most companies still focus directly on the customer experience, but a few are now using EX to drive improvements in CX.

Looking for a solution that can help? Aceyus delivers unmatched solutions, service, and expertise to contact centers, empowering them to take full advantage of our next-generation platforms. Our data reporting tools can help your employees deliver the best possible CX possible by providing insight into past experiences, which also improves EX. Contact us today to learn how our solutions suite can help you solve your contact center challenges.

Michelle Hernandez

Michelle Hernandez

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