Employee Experience is not a new concept, but more and more CX professionals are dedicating their careers to it. We spoke to CX professionals who either report to HR leaders or who have a joint Customer-HR remit as part of new research to decipher where Employee Experience is at.

As CX professionals get a better handle on the basics – customer journey mapping, design thinking, CX measurement – they look for areas to make a deeper impact to keep competitive. One latent goldmine is: their employees – turning their attention to improving the working lives of their colleagues and stakeholders as a means to superior CX.

And it’s no casual activity, here are some ways CX professionals are extending to EX.

  • Make the link between employee experience and revenue. One framework making a comeback is the service-profit model, which spells out a link between employee experience to customer experience and business outcomes. This kind of diagram helps to apply layers of analysis to better understand weak links in the chain and to know where to focus efforts. It’s about formalizing and quantifying the conventional wisdom that happy workers make for holistic and long-lasting CX.
  • Use people analytics to change stakeholders’ minds. A restaurant chain in the U.S. hired McKinsey to run advanced people analytics on their staff. They wanted to find out what factors would statistically result in superior customer outcomes. Using in-depth techniques, they busted myths. For example, it wasn’t factors like compensation structure or previous retail experience that reached desired outcomes, rather it was elements like commute distance and management behaviors. This deep insight shifts mindsets away from stereotypes so real impact can be made.
  • Change the role of the CX team from operational to enabling. One Asia Pacific hospitality firm restructured by moving the CX team under the HR function. For them, it was a logical move, as this team had taken on a strong training function – upskilling the rest of the organization in journey mapping as a means to firm-wide capability uplift. For many organizations at a certain stage of maturity, they must abandon a centralized model for CX and consider the role they play in empowering their stakeholders with CX self-efficacy. This means letting go of one skill set, and picking up new ones around change management, relationship development and training.

These are some ways organizations are turning their CX talents to the realm of EX. But in essence, they are making systemic and data-backed decisions to enhance EX with a specific goal for improved CX. If you plan to dabble in EX, only do so if you plan to commit or else spend your energy on other things.