Mastering CX Requires a New Focus on Employee Experiences

This blog post was written by Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research.

The business world will face new challenges and opportunities in 2022. While a majority of companies adopted digital business practices, customers and employees expect even better digital experiences from every company they deal with, regardless of size.

Your customers expect you to know them and respond with personalized experiences. Regardless of the situation, customers demand consistent data and experiences across every touchpoint, including digital, phone and in-person interactions. Individuals want to engage with companies in their channel of choice and when it’s convenient for them. Personalized experiences that build loyalty are a requirement, not an option.

Managing a distributed workforce is the new normal, but even that is changing. Employees demand modern workplace tools that simplify tasks, foster engagement, and provide the flexibility to work anywhere. A question in board rooms across the globe is what a business should do to support these escalating customer and employee demands? 

Embracing an experience economy

Market leaders recognize that the key to providing a best-in-class customer experience is to deliver a leading employee experience (EX). Almost three-quarters of the business executives Lopez Research interviewed in 2021 said providing a better employee experience would help them differentiate their business. Successful organizations will adopt technology and workflows that deliver the right insights and service at the right moment to the right person. Lopez Research calls these employee and customer workflows and services Right-time Experiences (RTEs).

Employee RTEs use software solutions that help employees quickly access, integrate, and act on previously siloed data. These best-in-class solutions create a frictionless environment that simplifies tasks, increases employee engagement, and improves productivity and performance. It enables firms to involve the right people, skills, knowledge, and resources at the beginning of a transaction– irrespective of their department, title, function.

You may be wondering what’s different about RTEs? RTEs are contextual and use artificial intelligence (AI) in software to learn and suggest information and actions. RTEs automatically adjust business workflows on contextual information, which means the applications use data such as location, time of day, previous transactions, and device type information into workflows. RTEs also maintain the context of a transaction as the person moves between physical and digital channels.

Context provides your employees with insights to better understand and act on your customer’s needs in real-time. A workflow can adapt to screen size and navigation methods (touch, camera inputs, voice, gesture).  Adaptive workflows allow the company to tailor interactions to specific individuals, creating effortless and rewarding employee and customer experiences. 

AI-enabled solutions allow companies to collect and analyze data from multiple sources, including transaction history, visits, customer care calls, and social networking feeds.  Machine learning within these apps will help companies automate workflows, streamline content discovery, and build knowledge iteratively over time as customers and employees use services.

Predictive algorithms will help employees anticipate issues and opportunities. Advanced products will provide prescriptive guidance for achieving the best outcomes by analyzing multiple scenarios. AI also offers features such as virtual backgrounds, noise cancellation, algorithms that optimize video and voice transcription.

The Road Ahead

One of the best ways to create RTEs is to adopt modern communications, collaboration and contact center technology. Today’s modern solutions provide intelligent services that simplify workflows and support working from multiple locations. Enhanced communications and customer care solutions allow a company to broaden digital sales and support channels to include conversational interfaces, virtual agents, live chat, and social messaging apps. The latest enhanced applications and workflows differ from what organizations delivered in the past because they focus on providing a rich set of features with a leading user experience for both employees and customers.

Modern solutions, such as Cloud-resident Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) services, support a hybrid workplace where employees can maintain the same tools as they move between home, office, and travel locations. CCaaS expands digital channels and allows people to engage with the company in their digital medium of choice. For example, these workflows enable an agent to use more than one digital channel to resolve a customer’s issues. These solutions improve the employee experience by empowering the agents to solve issues in various ways. For example, AI-powered contact center solutions provide sentiment analysis and guided assisted experiences, such as the next best action. Software as s Service (SaaS) communications and contact center offerings also allow companies to take advantage of the latest updates without requiring IT to purchase and deploy the technology.

The world changed and our systems must change with it. The right technology helps a company redesign the employee journey and the processes and procedures that underpin it.  It also supports business model innovation by creating flexible systems. A well-designed employee experience leads to higher levels of engagement, overall employee productivity and employer commitment. In short, delivering the right experience is the key to unlocking your company’s potential.

To learn more about the intersection of EX and CX, and access the Lopez Research white paper, “Mastering the New Digital Employee and Customer Experience Imperative,” visit our State of Total Experience page.