How Creating the Best Employee Engagements Leads to Exceptional Customer Experience

It’s time to rethink the title ‘Human Resources,’ it’s bothered me for far too long. It makes me think of resourcing humans: giving them just enough tools they don’t really need to help defend themselves from a barrage of poor corporate management practices, while simultaneously killing their spirits with another mandatory video on corporate policy jargon.

I propose we allow employees the freedom to use their wisdom, creativity, and good judgment to help us in reaching our goals.

Things go great when we are all rowing in the same direction.

Employee engagement is a critical concept of Customer Experience Management – one that is often overlooked. Employers may aim to "provide the best products and services their market has ever seen,” but if their employee experience is a lowlight reel of beleaguered staff being micro-managed by middle management, it's going to be a long hard road to get there.

In an extensive study conducted by Harvard Business review on employee engagement, researchers found that a highly engaged workforce inevitably results in a reduction in hiring and retention costs, corporate growth, increased innovation, a positively affected bottom line, and increased levels of productivity (Kaliannan & Adjovou, 2015). This almost sounds like you’d make more money if you knew what it was like to work for you.

Having a highly-engaged workforce leads to increased levels of productivity.

Is it just me or does this whole “employee engagement” thing sound like a winner?

Tower Watson studied 50 firms over a period of one year and this was what they found: organizations with high employee engagement had 19 percent increase in operating income and about 28 percent earnings per share (EPS) growth. Inversely, those with low employee engagement levels experienced more than 32 percent drop in operating income and 11 percent decline in EPS (Kaliannan & Adjovou, 2015).

Customer friction-points drive us to reevaluate the alignment our people, processes and tools to ensure a great experience, and to drive customer loyalty and referral. Having a great Customer Experience program can certainly get you there in short order – but without employee engagement and stakeholder buy-in, the effort is nearly futile.

Understanding your customer’s journey is important. But you'll only get there by understanding your employee's journey first. Engaging your employees and sparking a lifelong appreciation for your brand and your mission is critical for the longevity of your business.

It's time for companies to replace the title “Human Resources” with “Employee Success,” don't you agree?

Source cited

Kaliannan, M., & Adjovu, S. M. (2015). Effective Employee Engagement and Organizational Success: A Case Study. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 172, 161-168.

Charlie is a Customer Experience Consultant & Journey Mapping Practice Expert. His approach infuses customer journey mapping, customer-driven design, and customer success data to prioritize improvements that drive measurable growth.