Photography by Tampa Business Observer, Mark Wemple

Tony Johnson, chief experience officer for the global consulting firm 4xi, explains how devoting yourself to improving employee experience and customer experience can positively shape your business.

The last two years have been challenging, but there has also been an acceleration in areas of business that may have otherwise taken another five years to come to fruition. The customer experience landscape has always been evolving, but the experience evolution is now in overdrive.

Customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) have found their moment to shine at the forefront of business thinking. Taking care of customers and your team has always been the right thing to do, but now, at all levels, most organizations see the compelling business case behind these efforts.

As Albert Einstein once framed the calculation for energy (E = mc2), the same can be said for relationships within customer experience. Growth is the output of happy, engaged employees who deliver exceptional experiences, and when multiplied by emotional quotient (or EQ), the results can be game changing. When applied to growth, this might look something like (EX + CX) x EQ2. That is to say, putting people at the center of everything you do can have an amazing impact on your growth.

Happy customers spend more and more often. Happy employees tend to stay longer, reduce attrition and costs, and boost your business’s performance. It is generally more cost effective to retain your current customers and employees than to continually reload with new ones to make up for lost opportunities and people.

Satisfied customers and employees will be advocates for you in the marketplace and defend your reputation if you are attacked online. Glassdoor reports that 86 percent of prospective employees research company reviews and ratings to decide where to apply for a job. So a key ingredient to delivering great experiences comes down to people delivering on safety, hospitality, quality, simplicity, and inclusivity—and not just once or a few times but every time.

This puts enormous pressure on organizations and their leaders to prioritize the employee experience. It is one of the things that is easy to say but tougher to do, and it really isn’t as much about a fancy strategy or buzzwords as it is about adopting a few key behaviors and tactics that have an impact in real time.

Leaders have had the best of the hiring situation for a decade now. There were often more candidates than jobs, so they could not only be selective but also do so knowing the market was more forgiving of bad behaviors. Leaders were known to treat prospective candidates poorly once on the job, and communication, training, and recognition were lacking.

That dynamic has shifted, and leaders must adapt.

Those with a high degree of empathy, or EQ, know at a base level that you must understand your team, listen to them, and look at their work experience from their point of view. This invariably will help you be a better leader and inspire confidence in your team. Impactful leaders understand themselves first—and that fuels their empathy, respect, and connection with others. Those who lead with optimism and grit will inspire their people to create positive and emotionally connected experiences.

You can move toward a more employee-focused workplace by following these three tactics.

  1. BE INTENTIONAL WITH YOUR RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION.
    These are areas where organizations have not paid nearly enough attention in years past. This goes beyond finding great talent; it is about your reputation in the community as an employer of choice. It’s about being a great talent scout and taking the time to really listen to and be curious about those you are looking to bring into your organization. You must look beyond traditional skills and education for those who bring a positive attitude, experience, and innovation to your team. You should also be wary of your applicant tracking system (ATS) if there is an AI component to your online application process. Too often these systems may weed out great candidates because they don’t have a properly formatted resume or because of arbitrary keywords included in their cover letter. Now is the time to remove anything between you and the people who can help your organization win.
  2. PRIORITIZE ONBOARDING AND TRAINING.
    This may sound like a commonsense approach to employee retention, but it is one of the most complained-about items by employees and can cost you talent early in your new-employee journey. Robust orientation is more than just job skills and paperwork; it is creating a connection to others within the organization, providing tools to help people get off to a great start, and ensuring there is alignment between expectations and performance. Ongoing training and development should, of course, prioritize the skills needed to provide great service and quality but should also keep an eye on the future and be refreshed often. This is a way to show commitment to your team members’ development and give them a path to growth within your business or portable skills that make them more valuable to the marketplace in general. You may only keep great talent for three to five years, but that beats retaining mediocre talent for decades.           

“Fifty-nine percent of employees claim they’ve had no workplace training and their skills were self-taught.” – Lorman Education Services

  1. BE GREAT AT RECOGNITION.
    Everyone likes to know that they have done well, and showing appreciation for great work is the right thing to do. But there is also a case to be made for good business here. What you reward will be repeated, and that kind of positivity is contagious. Remember that when you think about powerhouse recognition, it must be personalized. Everyone has a different perception of recognition—some like it publicly and others in private—and, as a leader, you must know the difference. Authentic recognition comes not only from finding your own style of gratitude but also by including everyone in on the fun. The most impactful recognition is peer to peer, when colleagues and coworkers thank one another. Whether you use an electronic system, handwritten notes, cards mailed to your team’s homes, or verbal thank-you-messages, your gratitude should be specific: what happened, and why was it important? Finally, timely recognition is perhaps the most important piece. Too often leaders wait too long to send a note or express a thank you—and that diminishes the return on the gratitude. An immediate thank-you makes the recognition stickier when it comes to influencing future behavior.

All this is a way of saying that how you treat your team is how they will ultimately treat your customers, and that will drive the perception of your brand and business growth.

Customer experience has gone beyond a differentiator to be the price of entry for success. While great service is the expectation, mediocrity in the marketplace still leaves plenty of room for it to be a key pillar of your future success. Just as Einstein embraced the physics of motion, now’s the time to embrace the power of experience for employees, customers, and guests to elevate your growth as a people-focused organization.

Remember that GROWTH = (EX + CX) x EQ2 and that experience matters!

TONY JOHNSON is the chief experience officer at boutique consulting firm 4xi Global Consulting & Solutions. He is a world-renowned customer-experience thought leader, strategist, author, and keynote speaker. Tony is a certified commercial drone pilot, a chef, a mixologist, and a proud uncle, and lives in Florida with his wife Melissa and his pet King Charles spaniel, Charlie.

To learn more about Tony and his work, visit www4xiconsulting.com. You can buy his books from Amazon.com, or you can send us a note to Business In Action.