By Mauricio Dulon – Experiencia Cliente
Customer experience, CX, continues to increase its importance and be considered in business strategies. At all management levels, plans to diagnose and improve CX are already being talked about; however, an issue that is not being taken into account, and that is very important when generating a CX strategy, is the experience of the internal customer, the employee of the company.
Employee experience is directly related to customer experience. It is not by chance that companies with the best CX are companies whose employees have excellent employee experience.
Here are some tips to take into account in order to improve employee experience. Employees are required to perform and to attend customers the best way possible; however, in some cases, employees are not provided with sufficient tools to fulfill that purpose.
Providing the company’s staff with the appropriate tools to provide a good customer experience should be a priority of every manager committed to improving CX. To do this, the first step should be to ask employees about their needs to perform their work optimally.
Amazon, a leading CX company, asks its employees every two weeks if they need anything else to perform their job; they worry that their employees have everything they need so they can do their job optimally.
It is no accident that Amazon is one of the leading CX companies in the world, its employees have a good experience. Another important issue in providing a good experience to the internal customer is training. Just as we train staff in accounting, human resources, quality, we must also train them in techniques to understand and serve the client better.
A trained employee denotes security and trust to the client. Almost every company has a brand promise towards its customers. In order to provide a good customer experience, the brand promise must be aligned with the actions carried out by the company for the customer. In that sense, it is key that all employees have a clear understanding of the company’s brand promise.
By having a clear brand promise, it will be relatively easy to create company guidelines that guide employee behavior towards the customer. Having clear guidelines decreases the employee’s anxiety at the time of his actions towards the external client. Employees must be empowered to provide a good customer experience to the external customer.
Empowering company employees who already have a clear brand promise gives them the freedom of action to satisfy the external customer. An employee should feel that he has the power to make the best possible decision, based on his best knowledge, in order to solve a problem or improve a customer’s experience.
If the employees of a company feel comfortable in the company, they feel they have all the tools and training to take care of the client, they have a clear brand promise, and they are empowered, the customer experience is going to be good.
It is time to take care of the employee experience, before taking care of the customer experience. The internal customer is the same or more important than the external customer when creating a good customer experience.