Introduction
Hi, I’m Melissa Arronte, the Employee Practice Experience lead at Medallia, and I’m joined today with Ian Cook from Visier. I’m really excited to have him talk with us today about the connection between employee signals and customer experience.
Ian’s Background
Sure. A longtime consultant and student of how organizations thrive. Really fascinated by the whole process of how you get people working aligned to a goal so that it delivers business value. And through that career, got really pulled into compelled by the whole notion of the analysis of people’s behavior so that it affects business outcomes.
Employee Experience and Business Outcomes
I love how you mentioned employee behavior and business outcomes because that’s what employee experience is about. When we think about a business outcome, we think about customer experience. What an opportunity we have to understand not only the employee experience through surveys but signals, which is why we have such a nice partnership with Visier. Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of Visier, why you founded it?
Origins of Visier
Yeah, and I think you position it nicely. When we came to found the business, we were looking at the challenge of analytics and specifically in a way that a business person can make a decision. So we didn’t look at it from the technology like let’s get the data together, let’s just visualize it. We actually started with what kind of business questions do we need to answer? And all the unanswered questions were about people.
What Visier Is
In its most simple form, we are a technology capability with domain expertise built in that gets you very quickly to answers about your people. Simple answers like: Who is leaving? Why are they leaving? What do we make them do to stay? To more complex answers around how many heads will we need? What kind of skills do we need? How can we plan for our future? Typically used by a people in this group within the business.
Role of Front Line Manager
And so we’re in a similar space to Medallia, where – Not the CX data, we’re not creating that stuff. We’re giving them some just good, solid basic information around compensation, promotion, diversity is a huge piece for us. And what happens when you put that in the hands of the supervisors, Instead of five people sitting in a room worrying about how to change diversity, You have five people looking at their scorecard understanding how their decision changes that outcome.
Impact of Employee Experience on Customer Experience
We see it, and Melissa and I have talked about this at length, like a three-legged stool. You understand the customer’s experience, and you’ve got great signals around the employee experience. But what are the events that are actually leading to that experience? What if somebody had three different supervisors in the space of six months? Again, a common experience. How is that affecting the experience so that you’re affecting the customer experience? And so Visier pieces really all of that events the changes, delays, missed opportunities.
An Ongoing Experience Cycle
There’s this really important three-way view, where customer experience is what we’re all driving for, everybody’s in the same boat. Employee experience is what creates it. Events that affect the employee are what you can change in order to improve the experience. So that’s that really holistic picture which is our excitement of partnering with Medallia, that better together is definitely a key component here.
Employee Experience and Customer Experience Relationship
Right. I loved how you said that Ian, you know something as simple as an employee having multiple manager changes. If we only look at the survey data, we just understand that employees are feeling differently, right? And we can measure that sentiment, but we really need to know the events that are happening to understand that it’s related to a manager change, and there’s so many changes employees go through as you’re mentioning. I mean, turnover is the classic one that everyone in CX thinks about. Employee turnover impacts customer experience, but what about transfer of employees, or promotion of employees, or performance rating change? You can say more, go ahead.
And what people understand is that turnover has a direct effect on that individual, what is less well known is a thing called turnover contagion. Whereas if I’m in a group where lots of people are leaving, I actually start to question like: Why am I still here? It becomes that sinking ship analogy where everybody else is departing from this group, Am I weird because I want to stay? So it’s not just that the individuals who leave have an event effect, it’s actually they have a downstream impact on the people who stay. So, you get large amounts of exits, that has an effect on those who are still there, that means you need to respond, that means you need to understand the effect and then have an appropriate kind of response to that. So there’s just untold amounts of insight that are available by putting those two things together, for sure.
Right, and then it gives us the opportunity to proactively take action when we know there’s going to be an employee transfer or manager change so that we maintain our customer experience or potentially even improve it, but that we don’t have this unintended impact on customers that we could have known about, because the data is so easily available. Exactly, and that’s probably an example we should talk about. A banking customer of ours, who did something very similar to what we’re describing, looked at using machine learning that we have, an AI component that predicts who’s going to leave, focus on a very specific customer-facing population, ran a program to try and keep more of those people, used listening to understand what was going on for them, and used the event data to understand who is at risk, changed the dynamic in terms of maintaining the relationship with the customer, which led to countless amounts of revenue. We don’t have exact numbers, but it was millions and millions of dollars in revenue that came into this retail bank through that combination of: What’s the event? How to understand it, how do we make it better, and the downstream effects. So really great example of that, EX to CX event kind of stream and how analytics across that process, has a measured effect on the customer, which leads to revenue. Which again, is always the goal.
Excellent, and we’re getting another question Ian, I really like this question, so I’m gonna raise it. What are the major events in EX that have the greatest impact on CX? And the one thing I want to mention in this answer Ian, as we’ve talked about this, events is one thing that can come from Visier, but there’s so many more things, demographics, etc. So I’m gonna let you answer that.
Major Events Shaping Employee Experience and Customer Experience
I think one of the biggest impacts to watch for is manager change. I’ve spoken to lots and lots of people, where, Yeah, I’ve had three managers in the space of four months. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. What often – it looks on paper like a really simple change, like oh yeah, we’ll just plug so-and-so over here and put them in there, like done. On paper, it’s simple. But humans aren’t like that. We have relationships, we have histories, we have all of this cultural system around us, that plugging in a new manager can be disruptive. Like, oh I just knew which way was up and now I’ve got to work at it to engage with this individual. They keep changing things on me, I just don’t like change. I just don’t like what’s going on. I think that, one of those things we have a measure called manager instability, which is a a rate for how much managers are changing, and again, that’s a really key piece. And then, sometimes it’s events, and sometimes it’s delays in events. So things like being passed over for promotion. The world of work is very much more about growth and experience and trajectory on experience. So that the other thing is that we see have a large impact is like everybody around me is progressing and I’m not progressing like why is that? That’s not okay. That’s not fair. So it’s not necessarily that it’s the event that, oh I got promoted. That has an effect. It’s that I didn’t or others are and they’re moving faster. And so it’s often the gaps around the event that are really that the telling pieces in terms of affecting that experience. So I would say manager change and promotion are two very, very substantial drivers of experience for an employee. And those are event based, but we also have things about demographics and you’ll have more examples than I will Ian, but thinking just an insurance company we worked with, we found better customer experience for insurance salespeople who felt high autonomy on the survey, who were more experienced, and had a multi-site manager, meaning the manager wasn’t always present. So they actually got to deliver the customer experience they knew was right, with a little less guidance. Yes. We all like autonomy, that’s for sure. Do you have any examples of others that you’ve studied, where you’ve seen the impact in customer experience?
Impactful Events in Employee Experience
Yeah, healthcare sector is a big one for us as well. where patient care and a lot of that was more around overwork. So absence driven to overtime driven to, which nursing population was actually delivering the service. That links back through to some standardized measures in that area called age camps. So again, a lot of our customers have looked at that. It’s a staffing volume question, but it’s also around like how are we actually getting the right number of people. What they actually found in this circumstance is that they were employing too few people permanently, relying too much on agency and not taking into account, again, either absence days or peaks and volume and various other things. So what they ended up doing, which was probably counterintuitive for the finance people, was hiring more people and paying people a little bit more, but the downstream effects again, millions of dollars saved in terms of over time not spent. So by trying to be too tight on the employee population from a finance perspective, they end up spending in the wrong places. So again, an analysis of that whole dynamic linked back up to how is this affecting patients, the core thing that we care about. Making sure that people get the care they need, and they feel cared for at the same time. It was another great example. That really is a great example, Ian. I’ve seen similar things with our customers in banking, and looking at trying to keep the staffing to a minimum, then we have so much overtime and we actually have lower customer experience. So we actually find employees complaining to customers, right? They develop such a nice relationship coming into the branch regularly. They ask about vacations, weddings, right? They start talking about: can you believe that I’m here again? I’ve already worked 40 hours this week. Exactly. Yeah, and important things to keep track of both on the commentary and then does the data back it up and starting to look at that not just a single comment, but a mass of comments and then the actual bank data, the aggregate data behind it. So you get both the stated view and the data view and then you really know where you’re going. You really know how to make an effect. Right? Another example of that, and I’m sure you have many others, I think about is scheduling. So we can look at scheduling data, and see that the schedules are covered. But what we’re missing is the employee’s perception of that scheduling, which can be, of course, so important to them. It’s their life. How do they manage everything outside of work, and even affects their incentive, right? So this has significant impact on customer experience. Oh, for sure, yep. And again, allowing people flexibility, I think that’s also one thing we’ve learned through 2020 is trying to control less and give people choice more, tends to actually fill the gaps and create a better experience for employees, which as we know, rolls off onto the customer.
Excellent, Ian. I just love talking to you about this. We’re getting more questions that I think we could answer in a meet the expert session. So both Ian and I are available as well as some of his colleagues, Lexi Martin and Caitlin Bigsby. So, thank you so much Ian, so much opportunity on employee experience and employee signals impacting customer experience. It’s welcome. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you Melissa, and I hope this has been instructive for folks. Thank you.
