There are at least two users in every UX engagement that occurs for your brand. The first user is obvious, it’s your customer. The customer experience is defined by the collection of moments when they engage with your website, mobile app, chatbot, or online portal, every one of the rapidly multiplying
digital touch points that you rollout. But, there’s a second user that doesn’t get as much attention – your employee.
Anyone inside your business that needs to engage with the customer directly or work with their information is on the receiving end of all the documents and data that customers feed into the mobile app or online portal. This relationship is a part of the employee experience, a key aspect of your brand that is defined by how engaged, incentivized and enabled your people are to do great work for your business and deliver remarkable experiences when they engage with your customers.
On the customer experience side, a McKinsey article from just a few weeks ago stated that the next frontier for leading banks is to take all the great omnichannel experiences they’ve created and converge them all into a single integrated experience. The interface for that experience being the bank’s mobile app.
The piece then walks through the steps of a perfectly orchestrated customer journey. A user selects a personalized mortgage option on the mobile app and schedules an appointment to meet an adviser. Then after loving the offer, and the experience, she uses the same mobile app and her phone’s
biometric verification feature to sign the application right in the adviser’s office. Many leading banks have already made this fantastic customer experience a reality.
While the journey to integrate and perfect the customer’s various channels is well underway, the effort to unify the tech stack for CX teams needs a lot more work. The average contact center agent uses at least 10 disparate systems in a single day.
In a recent survey, 111 senior CX leaders were asked, “what is the single biggest challenge currently facing your CX operations?” The top two responses by far were legacy systems, processes and tools at 34 percent and labor force, staffing and agent performance at 27 percent. A fair takeaway here is that contact center agents have become responsible for making up the gaps and deficiencies on the backside of a growing number of systems and processes that are not integrated or orchestrated to make it easy for your employees to resolve issues or delight customers.
The challenge, or in my opinion the opportunity, is that we as CX leaders now need to make sure that we create unified, simple experiences that our employees love as much as your customers enjoy the mobile app. If you consider the mismatch between the customer journey described by McKinsey and the challenges that contact center agents face, it means that prioritizing employee experience is a major opportunity for your business.
The Employee Experience Behind the Mobile Banking App
Leading banks are creating end-to-end customer journeys on their mobile apps that make it possible for a customer to complete 100% of nearly any financial transaction without ever engaging with a live person. But unfortunately, that highly integrated experience doesn’t necessarily carry over to the internal systems that their employees depend on.
This is where it’s critical that you understand your employee experience. You can make it ridiculously simple for a customer to upload their most recent pay stubs into the mobile banking app for a mortgage, but that doesn’t mean your legacy systems on the backside are integrated in a way that makes it easy for your employees to keep the process moving.
In many cases, your people may have to check two or three disparate systems to work with the same data or documentation that the customer submitted in one smooth experience on the mobile app.
Major brands are getting better visibility and control over these moments by focusing on their Total Experience strategy. Total Experience takes a comprehensive look at Employee Experience (EX), Customer Experience (CX), Multichannel Experience (MX), Digital Experience (DX) and User
Experience (UX) as a holistic system. Taking this “big picture” approach helps you to break down your operations in a simpler, more connected perspective.
In turn, the Total Experience approach makes it easier to identify which adjacent or interdependent factors need to be improved or fixed to positively impact CX. This creates a clear opportunity to discover and correct any issues arising from disparate systems and outdated processes inside your business that may be disrupting the excellent experience that your mobile app is intended to deliver.
Mapping 100% of the Employee Experience
Another often overlooked opportunity to improve employee experience is to understand the employee journey the same way that we’ve become accustomed to visualizing the customer journey. This means mapping every step of the end-to-end employee experience.
Your employees have hundreds of touchpoints that make up their employee experience. Having these touchpoints mapped and visible to your leadership means they can work to remove as much complexity as possible. This puts your people in a position to be more successful, more often, in bringing
customer issues to a satisfying outcome.
Whether it’s calling the IT help desk, enrolling in benefits, interacting with management, or keeping up-to-date with internal communications – you should know how easy all of these touchpoints or actions are for your people. Do they simplify their lives and put them in the best position to make your customers happy or are they moments of friction that carry over to customer interactions?
In most cases, the difference between a customer support call that “checks all the boxes” and a truly great call that builds loyalty for your brand comes down to how well you’ve solved for employee experience and put your agent in the position to succeed. We are seeing that the most successful brands have a clear employee experience strategy, allowing them to set outcomes and to measure and inspect the employee journey to know that they’re meeting those goals.
A flawless mobile app experience is a huge differentiator, but that experience still depends on many other edges of your brand. When a customer decides to reach out to a live person make sure you know with total confidence that they’re connecting with someone who has been setup to deliver a world-class experience.
