In this article, we will explore how employee experience impacts customer experience and what we can do to improve both. We’ll see how they are mutually supporting elements of a well-functioning service team. We also look at the factors that contribute to employee attrition and retention.
Almost everyone agrees that behind every memorable customer experience is an engaged employee. It sounds obvious, yet customer service has a higher-than-normal turnover rate. In this new era of remote work, flexible scheduling, and the quest for work/life balance, a good attrition rate for customer service agents is still about 30%.
In broader terms, that means the entire customer service team will turn over in slightly more than three years. That impacts workplace continuity, erodes institutional knowledge and memory, and is a budget killer because perpetual hiring is expensive. But above all, high attrition leads to poor customer experience as new agents take time to become productive and effective.
Employee experience is about how individuals connect with their jobs.
It’s vital to employee retention, which is closely connected with customer experience. Solutions that enhance employee experience increase employee retention and lead to better customer experience. Happy, empowered, knowledgeable agents lead to satisfied customers who spend more money and are more loyal to their preferred brands.
EX and CX Are Opposite Sides of the Same Coin
Much as businesses can map out the customer lifecycle, there is a corresponding employee lifecycle that demands equal consideration. Each step of the continuum, from onboarding to training and coaching to technology to career development, should be about empowering agents. Empowerment is one of those buzzwords that is sometimes overused or talked about but never really done, so let’s be clear about its application.
In a customer service environment, an empowered agent is entrusted to build a connection between the brand and its users, to do what’s needed to resolve the issue at hand and reinforce the customer’s trust in the brand. This means having the necessary tools to resolve issues, the flexibility to take additional steps to relieve customer anger or frustration, and the backing of leadership in doing these things. That last point is essential.
“Leadership” is not limited to a service agent’s immediate supervisor; it reflects a company-wide philosophy that understands the impact of high-quality service on the entire enterprise. Agents don’t connect with customers by reading from a script, and leadership is not invested in creating the conditions for success unless it is as accountable for the results as agents are. A system built on learning, coaching, and continuous improvement creates multiple points of failure – or multiple points of success – to minimize risk and optimize results.
At GlowTouch, we work with our clients to create programs that empower frontline agents to deliver superior customer service and experience. This includes our award-winning WOW training, continuous feedback loop from agents to client, and investment in enabling AI-powered tools. This has resulted in industry-leading agent tenure of more than 4.5 years.
Use Modern Solutions to Solve Employee Experience Problems
A benchmark survey of customer service professionals across multiple industries included a perplexing result in how technology is often implemented haphazardly. Far too many professionals reported difficulty finding the correct answers to customer questions. That can be fixed with a solid knowledge base along with an integrated system that offers a holistic view of each customer’s history, dramatically reducing friction and promoting faster resolution. It can fix frustration of both employees and customers, leading to improved experience for both.
In some ways, innovation presents a double-edged sword. Automation and self-help tools mean customers can often resolve minor concerns on their own. At the same time, more people using more technologies more often results in higher service demands and issues that are more complex for agents to resolve. AI is beneficial, but only when used wisely. Overdependence on technology creates a new set of problems that benefit neither agents nor customers.
It is perhaps ironic that the advent of technology coincides with a continuing drop in CX quality, meaning there has to be an appropriate balance between people and systems. The live agent will always have a role, as there are some things no level of AI can independently resolve. Also, the agent is necessary for building trust between brands and their users, and for analyzing and making sense of the data that AI collects and collates.
At GlowTouch, we have addressed this issue by investing in building tools that enable the agents to provide correct answers to customers’ questions faster than they could otherwise. Our proprietary GlowText analytics tool that analyzes customer feedback at scale to identify both positive and negative issues quickly.
Employee Retention vs. Attrition and Its Impact on Customer Experience
We often discuss alignment in terms of drawing a parallel between contact center practices and client business goals. It is also necessary to find common ground between the company’s aims and those of employees while also orienting service programs to mesh with customer expectations. Optimizing the work environment is a significant element in keeping good people, particularly since there is a growing remote or hybrid workforce.
Ideally, retention begins at the beginning. The initial 90-day window is the make-or-break period. A smooth onboarding process, a well-constructed training program, and good coaching go a long way toward making agents feel comfortable and prepared for what follows.
Augment those things with a rewards and recognition program that acknowledges high performance, and you generate buy-in to the corporate culture while creating a sense of belonging. Then have a career development program where promotion from within is a habit, giving your team members something to pursue, which is a tremendous motivational factor.
Those are all process considerations. Those must be supplemented with up-to-date systems that reflect the modern service environment. We talked about the growing complexity of support issues as a catalyst for creating and maintaining a knowledge base. This also prevents different agents from providing different answers to the same question. The road to excellence is paved with consistency, including a process for effective customer engagement that conveys self-assurance, warmth, and empathy.
The Employee Is Also a Customer
There are countless articles on the value of keeping customers vs. finding new ones. The same applies to maintaining good employee retention vs. a revolving door of hiring.
By the time a customer contacts a service agent, there may be some frustration involved. The agent must have the means and the know-how to diffuse any tension, get to the root of the issue, resolve it, and take the time to listen to the voice of the customer.
Customers understand that problems arise; they are less forgiving about indifferent or ineffective service that does not provide a satisfactory resolution. Give your customers a reason to continue being patrons through agent experiences that support the user journey.
