Your Employee Experience Is Showing Up in Your Customer Experience

Companies spend enormous amounts of time trying to improve customer experience. But one of the biggest influences on what customers ultimately experience may be happening somewhere else entirely: between employees and their managers.

In this episode of the Customer Service Revolution, Denise Thompson talks with Dave Murray, Vice President of Consulting at The DiJulius Group, about the connection between employee experience, leadership and customer experience.

The problem is rarely that organizations do not care about employee experience. Many invest in benefits, engagement surveys, recognition programs and leadership training. The bigger problem is that employees experience the organization through their immediate leaders every day.

And when leadership behaviors are inconsistent, the employee experience becomes inconsistent too.

Why Managers Have So Much Influence on Employee Experience

Dave describes what he calls the “manager lottery.”

One employee may work for a leader who knows them, develops them, recognizes good work and has their back. Another employee inside the same company may work for someone who treats management primarily as monitoring performance and correcting mistakes.

Same company. Completely different employee experience.

That difference affects engagement, productivity, retention and eventually the experience employees create for customers.

Great customer experience cannot simply be announced by senior leadership. Frontline managers have to reinforce it through the conversations, coaching and recognition happening every day.

Leadership Training Is Not Enough

Sending managers through leadership training does not automatically change leadership behavior.

Dave explains why organizations need to give leaders practical tools and clear expectations for what good leadership looks like.

One example is the employee one-on-one.

Without guidance, 20 managers may conduct one-on-ones 20 different ways. Some become performance reviews. Others become status meetings. Some may rarely happen at all.

A structured approach helps leaders use those conversations to:

• Build relationships
• Understand employee goals and concerns
• Recognize strong performance
• Coach improvement
• Establish clear next steps
• Determine what support the manager needs to provide

Leadership development becomes more powerful when leaders leave with behaviors they can immediately repeat.

What PSECU Is Doing Differently

PSECU provides a practical example of how customer experience and employee experience can work together.

After developing member experience standards, PSECU did not simply roll those standards out to frontline employees and expect adoption.

Leadership became part of the implementation strategy.

Leaders throughout the organization learned the standards so they could introduce them to their teams, reinforce them in meetings and one-on-ones, recognize employees demonstrating the behaviors and coach employees when opportunities were missed.

The objective was not another corporate initiative.

It was sustained behavioral change.

PSECU also sent a cross-functional group of five leaders through The DiJulius Group’s Customer Experience Executive Academy, helping create internal expertise capable of continuing the work long after a consulting engagement ends.

If It Matters to the Boss, It Stays Important

One of Dave’s most important observations in the episode is simple:

“If it’s important to my boss, it’s going to remain important to me.”

A customer experience initiative may generate excitement at launch.

But if employees return to their departments and their manager never talks about it again, the initiative slowly disappears.

Leaders keep strategy alive.

They bring it into team meetings. They reinforce it during coaching. They recognize employees who demonstrate it. They connect customer experience expectations with everyday operations.

Without reinforcement, even good strategies eventually become another program employees remember from last year’s training.

The Connection Between Employee Experience and Customer Experience

Employees who do not feel trusted, supported, recognized or developed are less likely to take ownership of the customer experience.

They may become afraid of making mistakes.

They may stop taking initiative.

They may simply do what is required rather than looking for opportunities to create an exceptional experience.

This is why employee experience and customer experience should not operate as separate strategies.

The employee experience your organization creates eventually becomes the customer experience your customers receive.

Three Places Leaders Should Look First

For CEOs and senior leaders concerned about employee engagement, Dave recommends examining three areas:

1. Turnover by Department

Company-wide turnover can hide leadership problems.

Tracking turnover by department can reveal patterns that deserve closer examination.

2. Participation and Recognition

Look at which departments consistently participate in recognition programs and employee engagement initiatives — and which departments rarely participate.

The absence of engagement can tell its own story.

3. Employee Feedback — and What Happens Next

Employee surveys only create value when employees see something happen afterward.

Organizations need to communicate what they heard, what they are changing and what they are not able to change yet.

Otherwise, employees quickly learn that providing feedback does not matter.

The Future: One Experience Strategy

Five years from now, will companies still talk about customer experience and employee experience as separate disciplines?

Dave believes organizations should increasingly think about the experience as one interconnected operating system.

Employees have customers too — sometimes external customers and sometimes colleagues inside the organization.

When companies build a culture where people consistently create exceptional experiences for one another, the distinction between EX and CX begins to disappear.

The organization simply becomes experience-driven.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Employees experience a company largely through their immediate manager.
• Customer experience initiatives require leadership reinforcement after the initial rollout.
• Leadership development should teach repeatable behaviors, not just concepts.
• Structured one-on-ones can improve relationships, development and accountability.
• Tracking turnover by department can reveal leadership or culture issues hidden inside company-wide numbers.
• Recognition from an immediate manager can be more powerful than formal recognition programs alone.
• Employee surveys lose credibility when organizations fail to communicate what happens afterward.
• Employee experience and customer experience ultimately operate as one connected system.

QUOTABLE MOMENTS

• “If it’s important to my boss, it’s going to remain important to me.”
• “The experience is the experience.”
• “One bad leader can change that.”
• “We can’t just hope it happens.”
• “The employee experience your company creates eventually becomes the customer experience your customers receive.”

CHAPTERS

00:48 – Why employee experience starts with leadership
03:17 – The problem of accidental managers
06:09 – The “manager lottery” inside organizations
09:46 – How PSECU is turning CX standards into behavior
14:14 – Why leadership training alone does not work
17:40 – How much influence does a frontline manager really have?
20:24 – Building internal CX expertise through CXEA
22:25 – How employee experience becomes customer experience
25:53 – When leadership needs to own engagement problems
28:11 – Three things CEOs should examine first
31:04 – Will EX and CX eventually become one operating system?

Links:

Employee Experience Revolution Book: https://thedijuliusgroup.com/product/the-employee-experience-revolution-pre-sale/

Experience Revolution Membership:  https://thedijuliusgroup.com/membership/