The Customer Should Come Second

The old adage "the customer’s always right" has been repeatedly pounded into employees for decades to remember that is who pays the bills and their needs should take top priority. However, if you’re the employer, you might want to put that saying on the backburner and put more focus on your employees instead.

"Now, more so than ever, your employees are your brand," says Brad Clark of Centric Consulting. "In today’s ratings economy, it’s pretty easy to be seen as a positive or negative brand after your customers easily and publicly rate their single experiences. Companies may be hyper-focused on the customer, but without first taking care of those employees who are directly in contact with the customers, any customer experience initiative is doomed to fail.

"If employees are taken care of, valued and feel a tie to the overall mission and vision of the company, it will be felt through the customer experience. Engaged employees foster positive experiences that create engaged customers."

Companies might need to step back and evaluate what they believe makes up their employee experience.

"The employee experience is not a carefully crafted Employee Value Proposition. It isn’t Foosball Fridays and No-Meeting Wednesdays. It’s not talent management, employee engagement and human resources," Clark says. "The employee experience is the sum of how one perceives their experience at the workplace."

The concepts of customer experience and employee experience offer ways to make that person feel they are in the center of the organization’s attention – and it’s up to the organization which one will take priority.

"What really surfaced my passion around employee experience was my time working for a large healthcare management company where we focused almost solely on the patient experience," says Clark. "We spent hundreds of millions of dollars designing and mapping out the patient experience with little in the way of measurable results.

"After many deep dives into our lessons learned, it became pretty evident that the experience our employees delivered to our patients was equal to that of their own experience."

The term "employee experience" has proven to no longer simply be an HR department trend, but a concept that has value across industries.

"To prove that the employee experience is something that works, you don’t have to look any farther than the study done using Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work winners and those companies’ stock values," says Clark.

Glassdoor.com is a website where employees rate their past and present employers – the higher the score, the higher the employee satisfaction. In the study, the highest-scoring employers’ portfolio performance was tracked and compared to the S&P 500. The study concluded that between 2009 and 2014, these portfolios outperformed the market as much as 122 percent.

"What that study really proves is that the employers who are investing in employee experience are seeing a return of 2.8 percent better market performance," says Clark. "Simply put, a truly valued employee costs less and brings more value to the organization than an uninvolved employee who is focused on how much time is left until they can clock out.

"We will spend 92,000 hours of our lives working. I contend that those 92,000 hours should be spent in a place we enjoy, which will then be a benefit to our fellow coworkers and customers."

Many times, companies that want to refocus and center on the employee experience may not know where to start.

"As a consultant, where I arguably see the biggest impact is the onboarding process," says Clark. "Everything should be arranged around aligning the employee’s values with the company’s so that when the honeymoon period for a new employee ends and the perks fade away, companies will still have this valuable alignment.

"I advise clients to not think of onboarding as a ‘one and done’ experience for the employee. The typical model of orientation, training and shadowing isn’t cutting it anymore. We need to create an experience that is personalized, thoughtful and extends beyond the traditional orientation period instead."

Clark believes that employers need to take into account the individual employee and use all of the information learned about them during the hiring process to actively interact and engage that employee.

"You need to be intentional with the employee. You have to ask yourself questions like ‘What is their personality style?’ and ‘How would they like their physical space set up?’ It’s all of these little details that matter."

Centric Consulting has worked with numerous clients across industries on this topic.

"When we first meet with a client, we look for the symptoms of employee experience issues," says Clark. "These symptoms can include retention problems and project teams that can’t get off the ground. Very often we find that the company has spent time and money to boost the customer experience, but left the people driving that experience behind – their employees.

"We establish a positive employee journey from the time a candidate is sourced for a position until the time they leave the company. We analyze key moments along that journey, which are unique to every company, and design the workplace around bettering each of those moments."

Maybe the customer is always right, but the path to a great customer experience is paved by engaged and empowered employees.

For more information about Centric Consulting, call 888.781.7567 or visit www.centricconsulting.com.