If the customer is always right and the customer experience is key, where does that leave employees—who, as Tiffani Bova writes in “The Experience Mindset,” “carry the torch every day for the values and mission of their company”? Too many companies focus on the former at the expense of the latter, according to Bova, a growth and innovation evangelist for Salesforce. In this excerpt from “The Experience Mindset,” she makes the case for business leaders to treat the customer experience and the employee experience as equally important:
While many companies are clear on the importance of seamless customer experience and its impact on growth, the role employee experience plays has yet to be fully quantified or understood. This is often because leaders feel they can only focus on one stakeholder or the other: customers or employers.
Instead, they must leverage both customer experience and employee experience in a more intentional and balanced way to accelerate growth. An increased focus on employee experience can increase revenue by more than 50% and profits by nearly as much. Companies with high customer experience and employee experience exhibit a three-year compound annual growth rate, almost double (8.5%) those with low customer and employee experience (4.35%).
Unfortunately, regardless of what leaders may say about the importance of employees, according to new, groundbreaking research, nine in 10 C-suite executives encourage their employees to focus on customer needs above all else. As a result, the pervasive view is that, when push comes to shove, executives must throw their time and resources behind the customer and their experience if they want to grow the business.
That’s not to say all executives are missing the point. Southwest’s Herb Kelleher once said, “If you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees, and the rest follows from that.”
