Customer & employee experience

Improve performance and boost your bottom line by tackling your persistent people problems head-on. Shift gears through enhanced employee experience. It’s the secret sauce that transforms not just your employees’ satisfaction, but also your customer experience and profits. Don’t just talk about your people being your greatest asset, truly treat them like they are and experience the magic of putting your people first.

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You’ve heard the expression “two birds, one stone?” Well, what if there were a way to solve not two but three problems pecking away at the productivity and profitability of your business?

Axiom has a solution that’s so powerful it’s proven to bring positive, affordable, and sustained change to your colleagues, customers, and bottom line by improving your organisation’s:

  1. Employee experience
  2. Internal customer experience
  3. External customer experience

How we help with customer and employee experience

Our solution flips proven methods for enhancing customer experience on their head, repurposing them to deliver a great employee experience.

This refocus delivers greater bang for your buck because it has a ripple out effect.

Simply put happy employees = happy customers.

Yet while organisations invest greatly in improving customer experience, all too often they overlook those delivering it. That’s a costly mistake because the ripple effect is an outward phenomenon.

How your colleagues think and feel about their own experience with your organisation, their employee journey, impacts their behaviour which ripples outwards to impact your overall customer experience, be that your internal customer, external customer, or both.

But it is a one-way flow, there is no inward ripple effect – employees seldom see meaningful change to their own experience from your investments to improve customer experience.

And when colleague experience is bad or badly overlooked, your people become like rocks – blocking the positive customer experience you’ve worked so hard to create and want to continue rippling out to attract more business.

When you put improving the employee experience at the heart of your strategy, by listening to how your employees feel and delivering on the moments that matter to them, something magical happens.

You not only resolve some of those long-term thorny issues your Operations and HR teams consistently grapple with (like improving attrition, attraction, company culture and sales), you also improve the experience for your colleagues and your customers.

hand making ripple in water

Simon Sinek puts his finger on the problem when he says:

“Customers will never love a company unless its employees love it first”.

So, if all your focus has historically been on external customer experience with diminishing results, now may be the time for a rethink.

The shift to secure an excellent employee experience, enables you to kill three birds with one stone by improving the experience of your colleagues, their internal customers, and their external customers – it’s win, win, win.

Delivering results: The proof it works

One financial services business who recently benefited by implementing our Employee Experience Excellence model with their customer-facing teams, realised these improvements in under a year, without additional resource…

  • Employee engagement score increased from 37 to 65.
  • Colleague attrition decreased from 25% to 1.7%.
  • Customer complaint resolution times improved by 69%.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased 30 points.
  • The department’s operational costs decreased by 10%, and
  • The business retained 10% more financial assets than forecast.

Organisations can use this innovative solution with customer facing and non-customer facing teams alike. Regardless of whether colleagues are serving internal or external customers, the outcome is the same – the work environment improves, the employee experience improves, customer interactions improve, and business performance improves.

So, whether you want all or selected support with certain aspects of our employee experience service, here’s how we can flexibly partner your organisation to take your customer and colleague experience from good to great:

  • Identifying your biggest gaps in employee sentiment.
  • Providing you with a true 360˚ picture of where you are today.
  • Co-creating solutions with your colleagues to close sentiment gaps.
  • Implementing, celebrating, and amplifying colleague-led solutions.
  • Producing materials to effectively share your initiative’s key messages.
  • Measuring positive shifts in sentiment and key performance indicators.
  • Conducting spot health checks to monitor for shifting sentiment and/or benchmarking against best practice.

Axiom’s leading employee experience excellence expert

Christina Dolding is a certified customer experience professional. She’s been transforming customer experience, through improved colleague experience, for more than two decades.

Having worked inhouse with leading companies who were keen to become more customer centric, and won numerous awards for her work, she joined Axiom as a consultant in early 2023 to share her expertise more widely with the business community. In her words, “these insights and methodologies, focusing on employees first, can help improve the performance of any team in any sector”.

Customer & employee experience resources

How to deliver customer experience through employee experience – the Axiom way

 

Download PDF >

See how we helped deliver an outstanding customer experience

 

Read the case study >

Read Axiom’s proven process for uncovering what your colleagues are really thinking and feeling, so you can celebrate what’s going well and tackle what isn’t

 

Read blog post >

See how Axiom’s ‘Moments of Truth’ process provided invaluable insights for a newly appointed leader

 

Read the case study >

And with Axiom’s track-record, spanning three decades, in solving many of the issues that lie at the heart of the employee experience, we won’t just flag the challenges, we can also partner with you to offer solutions.

FAQs

What’s the difference between employee engagement & employee experience?

Employee experience is an employee’s perception of everything they experience throughout their employment journey with you. Every stage of the employee lifecycle counts – it begins when they see your job advert and join, it ends when they leave and it’s everything in between.

There are four aspects that impact on an employee’s experience. One of those is employee engagement but employee experience also encompasses culture, management, and measurement.

Why is employee experience important?

A positive employee experience fosters a strong company culture, it drives innovation in process, product, and service, which leads to improved brand loyalty, performance, and results.

92% of employers participating in a global survey said ‘enhancing employee experience was an important priority for 2023’ [Willis Towers Watson conducted the research in 2021 asking business leaders about their three-year priorities].

By focusing on employee experience, organisations can address any performance management issues causing them pain. When a business fails to focus on improving their employee experience, their top talent inevitably moves to an organisation that does.

Why is customer experience important?

Happy customers become loyal customers and they become advocates. Word of mouth is the best marketing money can buy. Research also shows it costs up to seven times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Simply put, poor customer experiences are costly.

What is the goal of employee experience?

The goal is simple: To make your workplace the most attractive place for people to work. The more attractive a workplace, the easier it is for that organisation to recruit and retain the best talent.

In the same way that a great customer experience leads to customer loyalty, having a great employee experience leads to colleague loyalty.

It can cost up to 18 month’s salary to replace a departing employee, so getting their experience right matters – and to more than your recruitment bill.

Colleagues who receive a good experience from their employer are far more likely to give discretionary effort, provide a good customer experience, and exceed customers’ expectations – be their customers within or outside an organisation.

It’s win, win, win improving the experience of your colleagues, their internal customers, and your external customers.

How do you measure employee experience?

In the same way you can measure customer experience and improve customer satisfaction, you can measure to improve your employee experience too.

Employee experience surveys provide some metrics – like your employee net promoter score and overall engagement score.

We can also measure traditional metrics like attrition, absence, complaints, and accidents – but much more is possible.

We can help you co-create the best metrics and framework to manage, embed, and measure a world-class employee experience, proven to also deliver… outstanding customer experience.

Talk to our experts about employee and customer experience

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