Customer engagement and retention has become a perennial topic of discussion among thought leaders and business owners in the past few years. With the “quiet quitting” trend, mass resignations and demands for altered work cultures, many companies are honing in on the need to ensure employees are fulfilled by their work and committed to their teammates.
Business growth innovator, author and keynote speaker Tiffani Bova has had a front seat view of workplaces and work cultures after spending 20 years in leadership roles at start-ups and Fortune 500 megacorps, and she argues that neglecting to ensure a positive employee experience endangers a company’s bottom line and reputation with customers.
If an employee is having a poor experience at work, their commitment to the company and product suffers. In turn, customers have less than stellar experiences. This necessitates that organizations boost employee satisfaction to boost customer retention, which seems obvious, but plenty of managers and executives have a bad habit of only prioritizing relationships with consumers, and neglecting to take into account how their employees feel.
Leaders must consider how changes in services provided for consumers will affect employee workload; Bova gives an example in which a business enables a client to directly place an order for a product through a fully integrated online process requiring the use of one browser tab, whereas employees, when asked to place orders on behalf of a client, still need to jump between multiple windows and applications, because their process has not been integrated for their convenience. A good leader ensures they don’t improve customer experience at the expense of the employees, ensuring their staff feels valued and heard.
Bova also notes that consideration of employee experience is a fairly new area of study for all that we’ve devoted discussion to recently, having been an afterthought, with many companies and leaders assuming rather groundlessly they were providing meaningful workplaces. As a result, many teams lack members focusing on employee needs, and leaders do not know what is happening on the ground, and are shocked when faced with resignations and complaints. Ignorance of issues facing employees is no longer an excuse, and it has become vital for any company hoping to survive, let alone grow, to put time and resources into ensuring a satisfying work experience for employees, because a business is quite literally nothing without them.
