21 Feb
Measuring Employee and Customer Experience
Customer and employee interactions have significantly and permanently changed, becoming more mobile, virtual, and distributed. IT leaders must apply a total experience strategy to drive differentiating digital transformation that creates superior interlinked experiences for customers and employees.
Total experience (TX) combines multi-experience, customer experience, employee experience, and user experience to transform business outcomes. When these pieces intersect, the goal is to improve the overall experience that results, breaking down silos while integrating technology with employees, customers, and users.
~ Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021: Total Experience
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation like never before. While the disruption brought several financial, social, and economic changes in the business world, one of the most significant trends that emerged from the catastrophe is a greater focus on improving employee and customer experience and engagement.
Over the past year, it has become clear that customer and employee experience are truly interlinked. After all, engaged, enthusiastic, and motivated employees simply serve customers more efficiently. A survey conducted in March 2020 found that 90% of consumers said it is important to them that brands take care of their employees and treat them well, even in tough times.
Unsurprisingly, TX became a buzzword – a strategy that “strives to improve the experiences of multiple constituents to achieve a transformed business outcome. These intersected experiences are key moments for businesses recovering from the pandemic that are looking to achieve differentiation via capitalizing on new experiential disruptors.”
Consequently, to ensure a seamless total experience, it’s important to take new steps to measure the customer and employee experience too. So, how can organizations measure employee and customer experience post-pandemic? Let’s dig deeper.
Employee experience and satisfaction
Workforce dynamics have dramatically changed as a result of the pandemic. Going forward, remote working may become a permanent or at least a long-term reality for most of the workforce.
Companies are finally taking cognizance of the importance of measuring employee experience and satisfaction. As defined by Gartner, “Employee experience (EX) is the way in which employees internalize and interpret the interactions they have with their organization, as well as the context that underlies those interactions.”
Employee experience is about building a wholesome view of each employee’s emotional and cognitive states and the broader ecosystem in which they function. It’s time for organizations to create personalized and more meaningful engagement with their employees virtually and generate positive employee experiences.
Measuring employee experience goes a long way in reducing turnover, attracting top talent, and ensuring higher customer satisfaction. Here’s a few ways you can do that.
1. Conduct surveys and collect in-person employee feedback
Sending out short surveys and feedback forms that consist of multiple-choice and open-ended questions helps capture and measure crucial employee experience metrics.
Dr. Wilmar Schaufeli, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Utrecht, listed three aspects of employee engagement: vigor, absorption, and dedication.
- Vigor refers to high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, the willingness to invest efforts in one’s work, and persistence even in the face of difficulties.
- Dedication refers to being strongly involved in one’s work and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge.
- Absorption refers to being fully concentrated and happily engrossed in one’s work, whereby time passes quickly, and one has difficulties with detaching oneself from work.
To measure the levels of vigor, dedication, and absorption, ask questions, such as –
- Do you feel energized and inspired by the work you do every day?
- Do you feel time passes quickly when you are doing your job?
- Do you think you’ll be working here in the next year?
2. Leverage AI and analytics to study workspace data, measure, and improve EX
Organizations may emphasize a lot on employee experience. Still, unless they create a culture where people thrive, and the leadership gains continuous insights about the effectiveness of EX measures, no amount of effort will bear favorable outcomes for the employees. Technologies, such as big data, AI, and analytics play a major role in this respect.
Take, for example, Microsoft VIVA. Microsoft VIVA is an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights and fosters a culture where people and teams are empowered to be their best from anywhere.
A crucial module of VIVA, VIVA Insights leverages tools, such as Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics, to discover new productivity experiences and obtain powerful insights that help improve employee well-being.
VIVA Insights enables teams and individuals to balance productivity and well-being by inculcating better work habits. With this tool, organizations can –
- Obtain actionable recommendations for taking regular breaks, learning, focused work, and mindful disconnect after hours.
- Foster healthy work patterns by providing managers insights on work habits that lead to stress and employee burnout.
- Understand employee engagement by mapping data about how people work to insights about how they feel.
- Address unique business challenges through additional tools and data sources like LinkedIn, Glint, and Headspace.
Measuring customer experience in a post-pandemic world
While providing exceptional customer experience is required for organizations to stand out amongst their rivals, it is not really enough in today’s time. COVID-19 has completely transformed the definition of customer experience. Businesses are now serving customers who have been impacted by the pandemic both socially and financially, have moved on from the traditional in-store shopping habits to researching and buying products online, and who will be living differently in the near future. Therefore, organizations must innovate, pivot, and transform to delight the customers of today.
In times of crisis, a primary barometer of customer experience is how a business can meet customer needs with empathy and care, triggering a lasting sense of trust and brand loyalty.
The question then is, “How can brands create outstanding customer experiences and measure their value too?” While there are numerous ways to measure customer experience, below we’ll discuss a few of them.
A new, global study called Experience 2030: The Future of Customer Experience provides insights into the mind of the future consumer and on the action brands can take now to grow, evolve and thrive, for the long term. A key finding of the study is that by 2030, 67% of digital customer engagements between a brand and consumer will be completed by smart machines rather than humans. And by 2030, 69% of the decisions that are made today during a customer engagement by human agents, will be completed by smart machines.
Organizations are continuously striving to deliver personalized experiences to their customers at every touchpoint along the journey. Smart machines, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, are being used in all stages of the sales funnel – reach, customer acquisition, retention, and customer advocacy.
Learn More: Customer Service and Beyond: Harnessing Chatbots to transform the customer experience
Features such as chatbot analytics and sentiment analysis help bots measure critical customer metrics, understand human emotions, learn what customers think about the organization’s brand, and build robust user engagement.
As customers interact more and more with the chatbot, data and feedback collected by the bot can help marketers predict customer needs, refine engagement strategies, create innovative marketing campaigns, and decipher customer satisfaction.
In today’s era, buying decisions are often driven by emotion than by logic. In such a scenario, the ability of chatbots to gauge customer sentiment brings with it unparalleled potential for brands to develop an empathetic connection with customers, tailor experiences, and capture the mind and souls of their customers.
Moreover, brands are investing heavily in technologies like augmented reality (AR), to help consumers visualize the look, placement, or use of a product or service virtually. Such intelligent technologies can collect heaps of customer data from online channels and gather valuable insights with speed and accuracy.
When acted on correctly, customer intelligence derived from data analytics can deliver experiences that enhance the brand’s relationship with its customers. A huge amount of data can be derived from customer actions – search and click behavior, email responses, and click-through-rate, purchase decisions – indeed, the potential to understand your customer is limitless.
How Acuvate Can Help
With numerous AI solutions and tools for data analytics, Acuvate, a Microsoft Gold Partner, helps organizations measure and enhance the overall employee experience at the workplace. Some of the employee experience solutions we implement for our clients include –
- Mesh 3.0, our autonomous SharePoint intranet solution for enterprises
- Mesh on Viva Connections
- Services for VIVA, Microsoft’s new employee experience platform
Additionally, we also assist clients in understanding and improving customer experience with tools, such as –
- BotCore, our enterprise bot-building platform for chatbot implementation and analytics
- Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft’s low-code bot building platform
To know more, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug