Enhancing employee experience with smart talent retention strategies

Pain points of CX 

The Great Resignation, triggered by employees re-evaluating their priorities because of the Covid-19 pandemic, is causing disruption across most, if not all, industries. A study by Microsoft found that 41 percent of the global workforce is considering leaving their jobs.

When employees resign, it leaves skillset gaps in the remaining workforce, increasing the workload strain on remaining employees. Over-extending employees can create new pain points in customer journeys due to service inefficiencies and a slowdown in customer care innovation while management seeks and trains replacements. This is not always a quick process, as research by Oxford Economics has shown that it takes new employees 28 weeks to reach peak productivity. The delay in productivity due to unfamiliarity in a new role can ultimately cost organisations more than US$34,000 per new employee.

“When employees feel supported in their work, get clear feedback and know that they have an open line of communication to their managers, they are able to deliver more positive experiences to customers,” says Frank Sherlock, VP of International at CallMiner. He continues: “Activating programmes that address things like employee burnout and listening closely to what employees need in the way of flexibility and benefits can be the difference between keeping your top employees or seeing them leave the job market altogether.”

In collaboration with CallMiner, CX Network provides a toolkit based on its survey of 110 CX practitioners to help your brand protect the integrity of its customer experiences (CX) by investing in smarter employee engagement and talent retention strategies.

“Activating programmes that address things like employee burnout and listening closely to what employees need in the way of flexibility and benefits can be the difference between keeping your top employees or seeing them leave the job market altogether.”

Frank Sherlock

VP of International at CallMiner

The importance of EX for CX

To explore how employee experience (EX) is connected to today’s customer experiences, CX Network surveyed 110 CX professionals. In this research, mismanaging employee engagement was voted as one of the top 10 threats to CX management success in 2022.

A growing industry awareness on how staff impact customer loyalty was acknowledged in the November 2021 CX Network Advisory Board meeting. Claire Hill, customer experience director at digital retailer Studio Retail, shared: “10 years ago you would not join customer experience up with the people agenda as it was separate. Now I am noticing much more investment being made in employee wellbeing and an awareness of how employee experience correlates to the customer experience.”

Also read: Digital customer experience expert insight ebook

Brianna Langley, CX specialist at waste management firm Waste Collections, agrees that businesses should respect the vital role employees play in customer retention. She says: “Loyalty as we knew it during the golden age of infomercials and cable TV no longer exists in our world of digital touchpoints and automation. Nowadays, customers are making purchasing decisions based on convenience of ease of interactions instead of some altruistic commitment to specific brand names. Departments that seemingly have no impact on customer experience still need to be mindful of how their tasks relate to the customer journey.”

Technological advancements increase the level of CX responsibility on employees and can intensify their daily work. Technological failures, for instance when digital or automated self-service channels do not fulfil user goals, can cause customers to become frustrated and place pressure on humans to find quick solutions.

Intense pressures on employees can cause them to lose motivation, productivity and feel dissatisfied. Sandra de Zoysa, group chief customer officer at telecoms firm Dialog Axiata, strongly believes that whatever position an employee holds, they should enjoy it. To achieve this, companies “must build a culture where people are treated with respect and select employees that are self-motivated to discover their true potential and path in life,” de Zoysa explains.

Cross-department collaboration

Good CX is not just the responsibility of the contact center. Alex Williams, CFO at retail company Find This Best, maintains that companies need to realise CX is not just shaped by the customer service (CS) department; it takes a collaborative effort from various departments to ensure that customers are satisfied.

“If your marketing, sales, supply chain, IT and other departments are not simultaneously working with the CS team to provide a consistent experience to each customer, satisfaction levels will remain low,” he explains.

To identify and fix pain points that cause frustration to both customer and employee experiences, analysis around customer journeys and conversations are useful for making targeted improvements to boost retention.

“If your marketing, sales, supply chain, IT and other departments are not simultaneously working with the CS team to provide a consistent experience to each customer, satisfaction levels will remain low.”

Alex Williams

CFO at Find This Best

Using conversation analytics to understand employees and customers

Conversation analytics can be applied to collect both direct and indirect feedback at scale to identify EX and CX improvement areas. In addition to the content of customer interactions, these systems can analyse emotion and key drivers to uncover the employee and customer concerns that require attention. Frank Sherlock, VP of International at CallMiner, urges organisations to not neglect listening to the Voice of the Employee (VoE). “When you understand the employee side of interactions, through emotion scoring, trend analysis and common challenges, organisations can identify areas of improvement – from coaching and training to career development – and better meet employee needs and expectations,” shares Sherlock. “When employees know how and where they can improve, get clear direction and feedback from managers, they feel like their employers are listening to and acting on their concerns, satisfaction, engagement and retention is all improved.” Julian Neo, managing director of DHL Express Manila and Brunei, says that among its global workforce thousands of employees take part in daily Performance Dialogues; formal conversations between about how the organisation is performing. This allows the employees to not only track their own performance but voice their insights and ideas for how DHL can better perform.

Do you analyse customers conversations for the purpose of enhancing the employee experience and employee satisfaction?

“When employees get clear direction and feedback from managers, they feel like their employers are listening to and acting on their concerns as a result, satisfaction engagement and retention is all improved.”

Frank Sherlock

VP of International at CallMiner

The majority of CX respondents surveyed (72 percent) reported they have some form of workflow analysing customer-employee interactions to enhance the employee experience. Additionally, 23 percent of respondents said they are expanding this to departments and employees beyond the contact center. Even though there is room for improvement, these numbers indicate a real awareness around employee experience’s importance both inside and out of the contact center, cementing its place for consideration when attempting to deliver excellent CX.

Also read: Contact center expert insight ebook

Implementing conversation analytics to enhance employee experience

For those considering conversation analytics to improve EX, it is important to take a crawl-walk-run approach. Sherlock notes that conversation analytics may be a quick path to ROI, but organisations still need to be committed to comprehensively setting up and continually improving their selected analytics system. It is also important that organisations action the insights gathered to create positive changes.

In Sherlock’s experience, the most successful organisations have started by applying conversation analytics to small use cases. Lessons from that project are then utilised to wisely expand the implementation across the enterprise. Sherlock says that by using the employee insights collected across voice and video customer conversations, emails, web chat and IT tickets, for instance, organisations can tailor programmes that support productivity and job satisfaction.

“For line of business leaders and managers, these insights can help make departmental improvements that ultimately increase retention, improve recruiting and impact the bottom line,” he explains.

When implementing conversation analytics to increase both customer and employee experience it is imperative to start with a realistic roll out of the initiative to ensure the whole organisation goes on the same journey of growing the programme and adopting changes as they are presented.

Improving employee morale, satisfaction and performance

Understanding and insight act as vital foundations for accurately improving employee morale, performance and satisfaction.

Improving performance

Our research group signals a reasonable amount of success with driving insight-led EX improvements. EX insights have led to changes in both departmental and company-wide processes (for 59 percent and 44 percent respectively) and changes in departmental and company-wide policies (for 44 percent and 37 percent respectively).

Data-driven employee training and real-time feedback helps employees feel valued and can enable objective and targeted coaching to improve their skills, self-development and ultimately career progression.

Microsoft utilised sentiment analysis to become more proactive with complaint-management training, by embedding sentiment breakpoints that flagged customers at risk of frustration or churn. Real-time prompts for contact center employees not only provided appropriate solutions for specific concerns, but also saved call recordings could be used as evidence for journey redesign when necessary. This empowered staff to successfully assist customers and optimise service design, while also improving agents’ skillset and employee experience.

Companies can also increase employee satisfaction and productivity through automation by freeing their staff to handle more complex and fulfilling work.

To reduce the repetitive workload placed on its employees with the high volume of simple tasks around login issues and rule clarification, ESPN introduced a chatbot. Just over two years following its implementation, the ESPN ‘fanbot’ is achieving a 65 per-cent deflection rate, exceeding its initial target of 50 per-cent.

Micah Citti, customer service operations lead at sports broadcaster ESPN, links this healthy deflection ratio directly to the increase in seen in ESPN’s agent satisfaction.

Have the insights you have uncovered regarding employee experience led to any of the following?

“Agents want to help people and want to feel like what they are doing matters, and the best way to encourage this is to give them work that is meaningful,” says Citti. “Helping troubleshoot issues with a live stream broadcast, for example, is much more meaningful to an agent’s life rather than answering how to reset a password for the 15th time in a day.”

Improving EX across a remote or hybrid workforce

James Parkinson, head of marketing content at Personnel Checks, a financial screening company, says that remote and hybrid workforces force companies to be inventive when it comes to keeping employees engaged. “Ensuring remote workers have the correct training can make or break a department, as well as ensuring relationships are built and mental health supported,” Parkinson remarks.

To combat this, CallMiner’s Frank Sherlock maintains it is crucial for organisations to remain vigilant in creating environments that support positive employee experiences, just as there was pre-pandemic.

The right conversation analytics technology can be used to uncover insights from agent-customer conversations. This allows supervisors to understand how they need to coach, manage and handle their teams. It can serve as a collaboration tool that offers two-way insight and communication, enabling supervisors to gain visibility into their team’s performance both post-call and in real time. Supervisors can also use the insights conversation analytics provides to tap into which agents are struggling with the feelings of isolation that can often occur in a remote or hybrid environment and provide them with more individualised coaching and one-on-one conversations.

Improving employee morale

Waste Connections’ Langley says that when employee morale is high, positive interactions between staff and customers lead to business growth. “When employees are content, that energy will naturally transfer over the customer,” she says. “For businesses, this means higher customer retention rates, better business ratings, and overall revenue growth.”

Companies can increase employee happiness by acknowledging its ethical responsibilities. Members of the CX Network Advisory Board have seen success in running bi-annual surveys collecting employee opinions on cultural issues, such as diversity and racism in the workplace. These initiatives have allowed employees to feel valued as big social issues are being addressed by their employer.

Rather than just collect feedback via surveys, companies should holistically and objectively derive insights from employees on an individual level, which can be challenging in large organisations. The CX Network Advisory Board maintains that good EX often boils down to whether employees have a good relationship with their bosses and colleagues in other departments with which they collaborate.

Employee experience beyond the contact center

Customer satisfaction is a cross-department sport

Customer satisfaction is not solely the responsibility of customer service employees. Finance departments, for instance, play a strong role in customer satisfaction as any errors around billing and payments have a strong likelihood of triggering negative reactions from customers. To deliver frictionless customer experiences, cross-department collaboration must take place.

According to the CX Network Advisory Board, one of the main EX challenges with cross-department collaboration in CX is seen in non-customer facing departments failing to understand the impact their role and department has on customer satisfaction.

Customer service departments and leaders must customise how they engage with other teams. The board members agreed that educating employees on the influence they have on customer experiences does not have a one-size-fits-all solution, and that while one initiative like VoC dashboards with real-time feedback from customers may work for some teams, for others they may consider it a distraction.

Democratising data in ways that are accessible for each department enables everybody in the organisation to work with data comfortably and feel confident talking about it. This allows all employees to make data informed decisions and build customer experiences powered by data.

Also read: VoC in APAC experts insight ebook

Expanding the EX reach of conversation analytics

CallMiner’s Sherlock says that often companies only consider how conversation analytics can benefit their customer service teams. This is reflected in our earlier data, as most of our respondents analysing customer conversations note they are only applying the findings to their contact centers. Sherlock reiterates that using these insights to their fullest requires applying them outside of the contact center.

Our research respondents acknowledge that the customer conversations held by sales and marketing departments could have valuable EX insights to eliminate customer and employee pain points. When considering the marketing department as an example, Sherlock explains that conversation analytics can be used to discover how customers feel about a company’s corporate messaging, marketing campaigns or competitors.

By using conversation analytics, companies can gain department-specific feedback to improve the EX of individual business units so they are better placed to deliver positive customer experiences. By drilling down to individual employees, brands can tap into previously unused, high-value insights. These insights can optimise the collaboration between teams, as well as wider processes and policies that were previously creating pain points for both customers and employees.

Ben Ingram, head of EX at media company Wongdoody, says it is important that companies dedicate themselves to a long-term EX vision. He says: “EX is about behaviors, which in turn drive culture. After all, culture is what we do when customers or bosses are not looking. This does not change overnight, however, as employees need to be brought on the journey and shown they are valued, and that this is long-term change and not a quick-win PR show.”

Final remarks

To ensure a healthy relationship between EX and CX, companies should map out a clear action plan of understanding employees’ needs and wants, measuring their emotion and sentiment, and identifying key drivers and common concerns.

The person-specific data, insights and feedback gathered by conversation analytics can be used to create dedicated coaching programmes to empower employees and increase their performance and streamline cross-departmental collaboration. They can also help to reduce churn by solving employee pain points, thus leading to less strain being put on employees as the workforce remains whole.

By looking to improve EX, companies can reap the direct rewards of having a confident, motivated and happy workforce. As demonstrated by the CX experts in this report, improved EX leads directly to increased customer loyalty and lifetime value. Employees motivated in their roles will help provide seamless CX across all departments, even if they are not directly customer-facing.

Read the PDF report here