The link between employee satisfaction and experience, and better customer experiences (CX), is well understood. First described in the Harvard Business Review as the Service Profit Chain, the concept has evolved to encapsulate understanding and then deliberately designing the employee experience to support better CX delivery.
What is less understood is that it is not just your employees who contribute to delivering your customer experience. There is a range of other cohorts of workers in your organisation who ultimately impact your customer directly and indirectly. These other cohorts include:
● Contingent workforce – including contractors, consultants, giggers, and freelancers brought in to do a specific piece of work.
● Suppliers and channel partners – vendors and delivery partners at the beginning or end of the business supply chains who are critical contributors to the overall customer experience.
● Volunteers – a segment of the workforce who give their time freely, but need to be kept engaged and informed of the organisation’s service delivery expectations to ensure they are being effective.
Do you have a clear understanding of who makes up your workforce? Do you understand what their experience is like? And importantly, do you understand how each of these workforce cohorts are impacting your customer?
As your workforce expands, so too does your need to ensure your workforce is aligned to achieving your CX - not only in terms of process and tasks completed, but also in ‘how’ they are completed. It is no longer enough to think about employee experience. It is time to expand organisational focus to encompass all those who contribute to delivering the right brand experience. We call this WEX – or WorkForce Experience.
How your WEX can work for (or against) your CX
One of my favourite restaurants decided to use a delivery service to enter the home delivery market. Excited by the opportunity to bring the restaurant experience home, I ordered my favourite meal. But when it arrived, I was left disappointed by what was actually delivered - my meal was cold and badly presented after having been quite obviously shaken during transit. My customer experience in this instance, and my feelings towards the restaurant in the future, were both impacted – not by the actions of any direct employee of the restaurant, but by their delivery partner.
Suppliers and delivery partners are impacting the customer experience for restaurants.
Fortunately, it didn’t take the restaurant long to decide they didn’t want to risk their product in the hands of a delivery partner they couldn’t control.
In contrast, a professional services firm identified an opportunity in their market: they found that finding experienced contractors was a time-consuming process that could delay client engagements. So they created a platform where they could have contractors ‘on tap’. The firm says that the time to recruit has reduced from nearly three months to just seven days. One of the ways they manage to sustain this pool of contractors is by maintaining and developing strong relationships with this workforce segment. Clearly, these contractors have a strong influence on the customer experience because they are representing the professional services firm. In this case it’s the contingent workforce that is at the ‘pointy end’ of the customer experience.
The contingent workforce is at the ‘pointy end’ of the customer experience for professional services firms.
Aligning your WEX to your CX
Whoever is at the ‘pointy end’ with your customer has a significant impact on your overall customer experience. And, importantly, the experience of the people who make up your workforce influences how they deliver your customer experience. The more your culture (and metrics, and incentives, and processes, etc. for workers) is congruent with what you would hope for your customers, the more that your operations are in harmony with your CX principles.
At CapFeather, our expertise in both CX and WEX means our team understands the critical connection between improving your workforce experience and improving your customer experience. We can help your organisation to make real and targeted changes to drive value. You can find more information here on our approach to diagnosing and implementing changes to your WEX in support of your CX objectives to drive real commercial outcomes.
Julieanne Dimitrios is CapFeather’s Workforce Experience Practice Lead. JD focuses on people and outcomes. She brings 20 years of strong analytical skills and human performance expertise to your Workforce Experience. JD aligns stakeholders from senior executives through to customers and suppliers, and front-line field and office staff to deliver your ideal customer experience and ensure your success.