According to Forrester Research, a company’s relationship with its customers is the number one factor that determines whether or not it will survive—not its products, its solutions, or pricing.
You should also remember that; an organization’s employee experience (EX) has been connected in recent years to how it delivers its customer experience (CX).
As effective employee engagement increases, ownership of customer experience is adopted by employee’s organization-wide, leading to less waste and higher customer profitability as sustainable differentiators.
When employees are engaged with their jobs and invested in the company’s success, they have valuable insight into how customers interact with products or services in real life and how they can improve those interactions.
Here are some essential pointers identified in a study by Northwestern University – Linking Organizational Characteristics to Employee Attitudes and Behavior – A Look at the Downstream Effects on Market Response & Financial Performance:
- There is a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and improved financial performance.
- The key organizational characteristic for explaining employee satisfaction is organizational communication (a measure of the downward and upward communication in an organization).
- Employee satisfaction is a key antecedent to employee engagement. Interaction between managers and employees with regards to supportiveness and goal setting, as well as job design were also key drivers of employee engagement.
- Organizational culture was another significant driver of employee engagement, where employees must be expected to cooperate and work together, but also to take charge and provide a voice for the customer within the organization. A fully cooperative culture feels the need to reach consensus on a single option, where a culture promoting healthy competition provides multiple choices which are then balanced against one another in an attempt to develop an optimal solution.
- When individuals and teams are competing to implement the optimal behaviors oriented to the market and its customers, such competition can work to the advantage of both the organization and its customers.
- Organizations with engaged employees have customers who use their products more, and increased customer usage leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
- It is an organization’s employees who influence the behavior and attitudes of customers, and it is customers who drive an organization’s profitability through the purchase and use of its products.
- In the end, customers who are more satisfied with an organization’s products are less expensive to serve, use the product more, and, hence, are more profitable customers.
- But the reality is that companies have yet to acknowledge and devote the same resources to employee-centricity as they do customer-centricity, ignoring the strong link between the two.
Customer-centered employee engagement can be a true competitive differentiator. Engage & Grow has been driving employee engagement around the world for years. Our unique employee activation programs have an average impact of more than 300 percent on employee engagement rates.
Call us and boost your business through employee engagement!