CX-related revenue spike, rendering the other CX measures mostly meaningless? Teasing out cause and effect can be maddening.
So we’re not going to try. Instead, we’re going to dig somewhere else and introduce you to a company that’s been doing things differently. Back in 2002, healthcare staffing firm CHG Healthcare Services was average. Growth rates were average. Sales and revenue figures were average. Employee turnover was – you guessed it – average. But the executive team had no interest in simply being average.
CHG wanted to be the largest and best healthcare staffing company in the country. However, its lukewarm corporate culture was restricting growth, and its turnover rate of 48 percent made it virtually impossible to hire and train employees fast enough to grow substantially. At that time, the CHG culture was similar to that of most companies: Communication was mostly top-down, divisional cultures differed, and HR focused on general administrative practices. It was a “good place to work,” but few employees were passionate about what they did.
CHG’s transformation started as an initiative to reduce turnover by understanding the issues that caused it. Leaders chose to focus on the value of their people, which led to a “Putting People First” program. They also decided to collect feedback from their employees and implemented an annual employee engagement survey, among other sources of communication. The feedback from employees was sometimes painful for the executive team to hear, but it provided many opportunities for improvement.
Gradually, CHG built a culture of feedback. Accountability and trust improved. Employees knew that their feedback was heard and acted upon. Today, CHG’s leaders regard the company’s employees as its strategic advantage. “Putting People First” is the defining organizational value, and it influences every decision. Employees rave about how much they love their jobs. CHG is at the top of our list of engaged organizations and has ranked as high as number 3 on Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, in the same league as titans like Google and SAS.
During the weekend following the announcement that CHG had taken the number 3 spot on the Fortune list, dozens of employees were so proud of the accomplishment that they gathered for the better part of a Saturday – unbeknownst to management – to record a YouTube music video entitled “Three Is Our Magic Number.”14 For CHG, “Putting People First” was more than just a catchy phrase that served as a clever double entendre to their missions of placing candidates in healthcare positions and taking care of employees. Engaged employees, who were clearly the top priority at CHG, created engaging Customer Experiences.
As for results, CHG is the most profitable company in the healthcare staffing industry. Turnover has dropped to less than half the industry average, and the company even managed to grow revenue and profits during the 2008 to 2011 recession while industry peers saw profitability plummet. CHG knew where to dig.
EX = CX
Organizations like CHG understand that you can’t build a transformative Customer Experience directly, solely by throwing resources at CX initiatives. You can redesign stores, roll out cool new products, and engage customers on social media; there’s nothing wrong with those steps. But without employees who care about customer service, a beautiful store is just a pretty shell. Without people incented to take risks, where are those cool innovations coming from? Don’t even get us started on the dangers of having jaded or clueless staffers meeting customers on Twitter. In other words:
To create a sustainable, world-class CX, an organization must first create a sustainable, world-class Employee Experience (EX).
It all begins with your employees. In the next few pages we’ll define what we mean by EX, and we’ll lay out a framework to build the right EX for your organization. For now, think of it this way. Creating a wonderful, profit-boosting CX is like gardening. You can’t order up the results you want – healthy plants – just by waving 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.
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 EX, the likelihood of a superior CX increases exponentially. When EX is poor, chances are the customer will see the effects. So, here’s the bottom line:
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 CX 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 CX from being a money-losing mess.
Engaged employees are the soil and nutrients in which your Customer Experience grows.
CONGRUENT EXPERIENCE
Despite this, too many organizations try to dash past EX in favor of CX. Why doesn’t it work? For starters, CX is an outcome. For decades, managers have treated customer satisfaction as though it were something they could conjure out of procedures, perks, and pricing. Wrong. That’s like deciding to lose twenty pounds by taking weight loss pills while ignoring a healthy diet and exercise. Even if you get results, they won’t last – and you will waste a lot of money in the process.
A winning CX is the direct result of the attitudes and behaviors of your employees. Employees should come first, with results to follow, not the other way around. Think of it this way: When you went through your most recent customer service trauma, did you ask yourself: “What type of experience are we providing for the employee(s) who were involved in the problem?” Probably not. But was the crisis a direct result of someone failing to step up to keep a promise, identify and resolve a concern, or provide one small extra bit of service? We’ll bet it was. The point? For most organizations, their awareness of the EX does not match up with the important role it plays in determining the CX.
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 slogans, packaging, or discounts.
That’s why the Employee Experience (EX) has far more potential than the 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 EX before CX 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 CX 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.
THE LAW OF CONGRUENT EXPERIENCE
Employees will deliver a Customer Experience
“Three Is Our Magic Number,”
