Omnichannel

Understanding the role of employee experience in CX

Why the store associate/ambassador is more critical than ever to the retail customer experience.

Photo by istock.com

March 17, 2022

With the COVID-19 pandemic clearly ebbing, consumer behavior is once again very likely to change with shoppers increasingly returning to the brick-and-mortar brands they love to shop.

And that means the retail store associate is once again returning to playing a more critical role when it comes to the retail customer experience and the customer journey.

In a recent blog on Retail Customer Experience, Michael Lowenstein, senior director of employee experience at InMoment, writes that store associate engagement is as valuable as customer engagement and how employee ambassadorship strategies are a key element to customer advocacy.

"From my perspective, experiences that drive customers' emotional brand trust and bonding can be both shaped and sustained. That's largely a function of organizational culture, customer-focused processes and ambassadorial behavior," Lowenstein wrote.

To get further insight on the increasingly important role the store associate, aka ambassador, is playing in retail today, and in the future, Retail Customer Experience reached out to Mark Smith, vice president of digital engagement at CSG.

Smith is an industry pioneer regarding the analytics of customer behavior and orchestration of customer journeys and a CX veteran with 20-plus years of global experience in marketing applications and analytical CRM. He founded Quadstone, a data mining company focused explicitly on the analytics of customer behavior, and later Kitewheel, a provider for customer journey orchestration and analytics.

Q. So when we talk about employees being important in the customer journey, are we talking about floor associates and online customer agents or literally everyone in the retail environment? Does that mean each "employee" set needs a unique strategy to keep them engaged?

A. Every employee can impact your product, your brand and your customers' experiences — even those who don't interact with customers directly or have a traditional "customer service" role. Extraordinary customer experiences happen when every department is aligned and shares a CX-driven strategy and vision. More and more companies recognize the importance of this alignment and that is why we're seeing great momentum in the prioritization of CX in business strategy.

Just as brands should personalize their CX to each individual, they should align their employee experience to each customer's needs, empower their people to do right by their customers and make them valuable advocates for the brand. The same digital tools that can make the right offers to customers should be used to support employees delivering that right offer too.

In addition, businesses can apply the same philosophy and approach used for customer satisfaction to employee well being and engagement. For example, brands should communicate with employees through the channels they prefer; provide employees with the tools they need to succeed — like interactive voice response that gathers relevant customer input ahead of speaking to the customer, knowledge hubs with easy to find resolutions, and more; and manage the employee journey from start to finish to ensure it's personalized, proactive and productive.

Q. When we talk about the fusion of Voice of Customer (VoC), Voice of Process (VoP) and Voice of Employee (VoE) does one of the three "top'" the others in terms of importance to the customer experience or are they all critical?

A. David Ogilvy once said: "the trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say."

Up to 90% of CX analytics data is drawn from survey responses, also known as VoC, though surveys often fail to provide a reliable and complete picture, as they only show the extremes and capture a customer's sentiment at one point in time. Businesses can gain deeper insights into what drives great customer experience by overlaying real-time customer behavior data (Voice of Process/VoP) over VoC data — matching survey responses with specific customer activity.

Taking it a step further, standout CX happens when you incorporate not only VoC and VoP but also VoE. This means that business leaders need to both promote customer-obsessed thinking within their workforce and gather employee feedback to shape how they understand the customer experience.

To answer your question, none of these is more important than the other — they all need to culminate in order to generate a powerful CX. When brands understand all three, they can go beyond who, when and how and get to the "why" of every interaction.

Q. How can a retailer begin to identify potential disconnect between a store associate and the customer experience and what's the first step to eliminate that disconnect?

A. CX should not come at the expense of EX. In 2022, consumers are demanding more from brands, and a handful of brands have set a high bar for CX. Now consumers expect the same from every organization they interact with. When adjusting for higher expectations from customers, leaders need to be careful that the extra push doesn't result in overwhelmed employees.

Employees often have bottom-up insight that managers can miss, which provide valuable new angles of analysis. When there is a disconnect between employee and customer perception, this implies a larger gap in the experience as well.

Customer journey analytics tools are more advanced and powerful than ever and can map out the customer journey down to a science, including drop-offs, sticking points and key engagements. CX teams can then dig deeper to determine whether those weak points were due to employee error or miscommunication. This also re-emphasizes the importance of surveys to get buy-in from both customers and employees, in their own words.

Leaders can rectify disconnects by collaborating with store associates and other customer-facing employees to help them better understand the brand image and customer journey goals. This also provides an additional opportunity for leaders to ensure employees have the resources and support they need to provide the best experience to the customer.

By packaging the customer journey to make it seamless and intentional, customers will also be more likely to be put in the hands of the right employees at the right time. This results in less stress from employees tasked with handling issues that fall outside of their purview and a quicker time to resolution for the customer.

Q. What are some CX tactics you recommend retailers always use or use first to optimize the employee journey?

A. In the same way that customer journey orchestration allows brands to understand customer pain points before they disengage or seek out a competitor, employers should understand workforce pain points.

My formula for success is for brands to fuse human instinct and compassion, AI and advanced technologies, and business best practices — this applies for both employee journeys and customer journeys. Invest in technologies that elevate the employee experience and complement what each person is bringing to the table, giving them the knowledge to succeed rather than replacing jobs or adding administrative work.

Overall, the same philosophies apply to employee experience and CX. Brands should listen to better understand pain points, reach out at the right time and in the right channels, and provide the right resources to allow for a productive and fulfilling experience.

For additional insight on the changing role of store associates and customer service agents, check out this e-book from Talkdesk.