You have a problem with a service, so you contact the provider. The service agent is friendly and tries to be helpful, but someone else in the organisation has to act to solve your issue. Only, that is not so apparent, and the agent has to clumsily uncover this reality while talking to you. They are juggling multiple screens and applications while attempting to contact other people who can accelerate the resolution, all the while hoping to show you that they do care and want to address your concerns.
This scenario creates a poor customer experience. The poor customer experience stems from a poor employee experience. While companies focus considerable attention on keeping customers happy, employees have to make do with fractured systems, operational silos and incomplete information that conspire to make their jobs much harder.
"Employee and customer experiences are much closer today than they ever were in the past," says Muhammed Omar, who is the Country Manager for Africa at ServiceNow. "Business transformation is all about offering digital experiences that are superior. When we look at those experiences, it comes down to both the customer as the consumer of the service, as well as the internal employee. If you have a superior employee experience internally, that empowers the employee to drive customer value."
Why employee experiences fall short
According to Gartner, only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experience, leading to more departures and burnouts – not to mention lapses in customer experience. A competitive job market is leading to more companies making the change, though they still find that keeping up with employee expectations is complex and can even be unsustainable.
When companies attempt to fix employee concerns through isolated interventions, they won't get far. A good employee experience requires the same as a good customer experience: it has to be coherent, holistic and integrated.
"Organisations have invested in employee experience to the point where we see a number of them appoint individuals whose core responsibility is to ensure employee experience is met," says Omar. "But a lot of companies still have multiple portal solutions and backend applications, and it becomes very complex and confusing. It's key to provide a single point of interface for the employee for all required services."
Employee experience combines multiple channels and touch-points in an organisation: IT, HR, facilities and legal are some of the internal services that qualify under its banner. Onboarding a new employee is a clear example: this journey is often bogged down with paperwork, delays and numerous manual processes, all begging for consolidation and automation.
Fixing employee and customer experiences
Service management platforms have been cutting their teeth in all these areas and the leading vendors are now combining them alongside customer experience systems to provide a comprehensive answer. Omar distils the necessary features of such a solution into four key areas:
- One pane of glass: Front, mid and backend applications, processes and interfaces consolidate into a single omnichannel platform for customers and employees.
- Context: The information presented to employees as an example is contextual to their current needs, including unique elements based on location and special dates, like public holidays.
- Self-service: Employees and customers can submit new service requests or log issues they experience, which can be tracked. In addition to this, they can locate answers if they wish, using search features to locate specific information.
- Process automation: Manual processes often slow down and break experiences –proper automation across the front, middle and back end make a definitive difference. For example, a request or issue from a customer can be tracked from a single interface as it is fulfilled from one-level to two-level support, with full transparency, without the customer having to call the contact centre for an update.
These four principles define the foundation for good overall experiences with a business, says Omar: "Broken silos between front, middle and back office is what creates the fundamental challenge in delivering superior customer experiences. Success starts when you combine those through a single platform and provide an omnichannel experience."
Concepts such as omnichannel are more readily associated with customers. Yet there is a fine line separating customer and employee experiences, and the same technologies can serve both. More so, a platform solution ensures they are two sides of the same coin, creating an unbroken thread for everyone. Platform services bring even more to the table, such as extensive reporting and analytics, chatbots, artificial intelligence, mobile support and natural language processing.
Indeed, the platform is why we can even have this conversation, says Omar: "A lot of what we do in service management didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago. Platforms have helped create a ubiquity that you can introduce everywhere in your business – front, middle, back and with the customer. This is why we can talk about employee and customer experiences in the same breath. They can now stem from the same foundation and enjoy the same advantages. One becomes an extension of the other."
To improve your customer experience, look at your employee experience. Is it fractured, slow and full of frustration? The same tools that delight customers can support employees. Whatever holds back employees from doing satisfying work will inevitably sour your customers. Good customer experiences grow from good employee experiences – and both stand on the foundation of an integrated, omnichannel service platform.
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