Employee Experience Is More Powerful Than You Think: It Could Boost Consumer Experience

Businesses, after reaping the benefits of providing exceptional customer experience for the longest time ever, are now realizing the advantages of improving the employee experience.

Contact Energy, a New Zealand-based electricity generation company, used better employee experience as a criterion to transition from a traditional national energy provider to one of the topmost energy providers in the New Zealand.

At Contact Energy, employee engagement improved from 36% in 2015 to 79% in 2019. The company has even seen an improvement in the employee Net Promoter Score (NPS) from -49 to 33, as a result of which the customer NPS climbed from -13 to 27. In 2015, 66% of complaints were received on account of customer experience, which is down to 8% in 2019.

Organizations earlier designed processes keeping systems in mind, not the employees or customers.

Customers at Contact Energy were even referred to as the installation control points, and the company was called the biller.

As the user experience gained crucial importance and became the necessary foundation for the service-based sector world over, the employees at the customer-facing end faced jeopardy.

The lack of empathy toward an employee was fast translating into demotivated employees, thus adversely affecting the business revenue. Previously, most customer service representatives were evaluated based on metrics such as call length and the number of calls handled. With the introduction of newer customer analytical tools, the businesses now focus on more meaningful metrics such as customer retention and satisfaction.

Analytics and automation have made the employees more productive because technology gives them a complete overview of the end revenue changes (of which they are a huge part) and reduced their repetitive tasks.

Customer service representative employees are the face of a business that conveys the vision and its offerings. Consequently, a good employee experience reduces the overall stress factor, thus increasing the efficiency metrics.

Employee experience is gradually becoming a part of the customer experience. Because the focus is not only on ‘how’ or ‘what’ businesses provide products and services but ‘the way’ they offer their wares.