How Today’s CX Leaders Can Connect Customer and Employee Experience for Radical CX Innovation
To be innovative, CX professionals need to tap into the full experience ecosystem, harnessing intelligence across channels, from whenever, wherever, and however your customers are talking to and about your brand, and integrate that with other sources of customer data and analytics. To be radically innovative, however, requires CX professionals to think even bigger—expanding their perspective to also include employee and market intelligence.
What do you think of when you hear “radical innovation?” When you look past the buzzwords, you’ll find an idea that is at the heart of technology—the idea that humans can create something that breaks the mold and changes the way we complete tasks in everyday life.
The theme of this year’s Forrester CXNYC conference was “Changing the Game—Leading Radical CX Innovation,” and since then, I have found myself thinking more and more about what radical innovation looks like in our space.
If you were to look at customer experience from a bird’s eye view, you would see a mass of legacy approaches. Why? Because most companies are still talking about CX in a vacuum. The truth is that experience data is everywhere; it’s in different languages and on different channels and forums, comes from a variety of audiences, and lives both inside and outside of traditional Voice of Customer programs.
Customer feedback data is important, but it is also limited. It only offers one perspective on how to leverage CX to improve relationships and business outcomes. To be innovative, CX professionals need to tap into the full experience ecosystem, harnessing intelligence across channels, from whenever, wherever, and however your customers are talking to and about your brand, and integrate that with other sources of customer data and analytics—clickstream data, CRM data, etc. To be radically innovative, however, requires CX professionals to think even bigger—expanding their perspective to also include employee and market intelligence.
This is our focus at Pearl-Plaza; to look beyond what CX has been to envision the future of feedback, and then create the technology that realizes that future. At Forrester CXNYC, we presented an example of how we are empowering our client Massage Envy to be radically innovative by looking at their brand experience from both a customer experience and employee perspective finding the critical intersections.
The Inseparable Relationship Between CX and EX
The connection between customer experience and employee experience has long been discussed, but what does that actually look like in the data? Our client Massage Envy was able to paint a picture of this connection and discover actionable intelligence when they implemented an EX program to complement their existing CX program.
Massage Envy had been using Pearl-Plaza to measure points on the customer journey for more than four years. There were strong indicators in their customer data regarding the connection between customer turnover and employee turnover and customer satisfaction.
Using these indicators, the Massage Envy team partnered with Pearl-Plaza Employee Experience and Data Sciences team to implement an employee experience program that would mirror the path of the customer journey.
In the course of the analysis, the team was able to identify key drivers of employee satisfaction and correlate them to customer satisfaction. Massage Envy was then able to act on this intelligence by implementing improved training procedures, which in turn lead to higher employee satisfaction, improved customer experience and better profitability for their business—a definite win-win-win result!
Combining Strategic Services with Sophisticated Technology
Brands like Massage Envy are truly leading radical CX innovation by implementing technology that assesses the entire experience (customer, employee, and beyond) and delivers true intelligence.
This success was made possible not only by innovative technology, but also by the philosophy behind our solution: “Machine-driven, human assisted.” This idea of combining strategic services with sophisticated technology is crucial given the sheer amount of complex data today’s companies take in, as well as the amount of meaning we need to derive from it to make it actionable.
If we rely solely on human analysis, getting meaning from this mountain of data is impossible. There simply aren’t enough data scientists in the world or hours in the day to process the amount of data companies gather. On the other hand, computers on their own are fallible.
The Pearl-Plaza solution uses data science—algorithms, machine learning, neural nets, and others—to create smarter, better analytics that are carefully curated by trained data scientists. The machine-driven approach allows businesses to address the complexities of data overload while the human assistance provides the context and direction that delivers truly actionable results.
The success Massage Envy had with this solution is proof that the industry is changing. Relying solely on technology and customer feedback isn’t going to cut it in today’s experience economy. I believe our VP of Data Science, Levi Roberts, said it best:
“The future of feedback is coming, and it’s becoming more and more clear that technology cannot be the only solution to solve experiences that are emotionally charged. In a world where consumer expectations are rising faster than brands can keep up, it is the right combination of strategic services and tech that will drive experiences forward and unlock future success.”
With a 360 view of experience and the combination of strategic services and sophisticated technology, Pearl-Plaza is leading in radical CX innovation, realizing the future of feedback today.
The ability to connect employee and customer data and combine strategic services with sophisticated technology are just a few of the many analyses available in the Pearl-Plaza Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform. To learn about more about how we are radically innovating the world of CX, read the full platform eBook today!
