87% of organizations around the globe state that diversity is a priority area for them to focus on. It’s becoming more and more important to develop and implement these initiatives in your CX team. 

What is diversity in customer experience?

Diversity in customer experience is about who’s on your team. To be more innovative, you need diversity of thought. To cater to all of your customers’ unique needs, you need to have a plurality of opinions and perspectives. It’s so much more than gender diversity: it includes cultural background, work experience, race, age, and more. 

The next step beyond diversity is inclusion, because if you have diversity but not a culture that includes people who are different, then your diversity is meaningless. Without inclusion, people end up leaving your team because no one is listening to them and they don’t get the respect they deserve. 

Diversity makes good business sense, but it must be paired with an inclusive culture. When you’re looking for the best talent for your CX team, you need to recognize that talent comes in all different shapes and sizes. Being equitable means creating an environment that enables every individual to flourish according to their own different talents and abilities. 

What are the benefits of a diverse CX team? 

More diverse customer experience 

No matter what industry you operate in, your customers are likely to be a diverse mix of people with a mix of religion, race, social status, ableness, and other characteristics. 

The more diverse your customer experience team is, the better your employees will be at communicating, having empathy, and understanding the buyer. Diverse talent means you can more easily reach new markets and customer bases that you might not otherwise understand. 

To win in a diverse market, your customer experience team needs to be able to empathize with the customers they’re trying to help. If they’re able to get on the same page as customers with values and culture, the easier they’ll be able to connect with them on a human level. 

Improved employee experience

The better the employee experience, the better the customer experience. This includes regular interactions with those who look, think and sound different from the majority demographic. 

The end result is novel and unexpected ways of working and a work dynamic that eliminates unconscious bias to help employees develop into the best version of themselves. This creates a virtuous circle which ends up attracting even more diverse talent to the company. 

New and innovative ideas

One study showed that companies with more diverse management teams had 19% higher innovation revenues than those with below-average diversity scores. 

Different minds are capable of coming up with new and more creative solutions to problems – diverse teams are less likely to fall victim to groupthink. Many of the problems of large corporations stem from their inability to think, act and solve problems differently from the way things have been done in the past. 

Companies must hire people from different personal and professional backgrounds in order to move past this paralysis, so they can find new solutions, create new lines of revenue, cut costs and increase profitability.

Improved profitability

Diversity in customer experience has distinct financial benefits. Studies show that companies who embed diversity and inclusion into their culture have an advantage over those who don’t. 

Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity outperform their competitors by 21% in profitability, and are 27% more likely to have superior value creation. The most ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to outperform the least ethnically diverse. 

How to create a diverse customer experience team

When it comes to creating diversity in customer experience, good intentions are a start but implementation and accountability matter more. Organizations need to actively work to create a culture of diversity and inclusion in the customer experience in order to see results.   

Measure diversity

Just like any other metric, measurement can be a good first step. Understanding not only how diverse your team currently is, but also how that diversity impacts their work experience, is critical to attracting and retaining great talent. 

For example, Help Scout and Slack have both completed employee diversity surveys and then compared their results to the US average. 

Buffer started analyzing their gender pay gap in 2017 and made changes over time to reduce their pay gap from 15.1% at the highest to 5.5% in 2021. 

You can also measure your diversity efforts by looking at the length of employment or the rate of promotion of employees of different race, gender, and other protected classes. If you are hiring diversely, but not promoting and rewarding people equally, you’re left with a leaky funnel. Your team might start off diverse in entry level positions, but you’ll never have a fully representative company. 

Recruit people with different backgrounds and cultures

Acquiring diverse talent means that you have to actively pay attention to this in all phases of recruitment, to make sure you don’t succumb to unconscious bias and attract only a small group of people, similar to the people you already employ. 

One way to ensure diversity is to interview every candidate with at least three team members who represent different backgrounds and viewpoints. You might also want to review resumes “blindly,” with names and identifying information removed so you can concentrate solely on their experience and qualifications. 

Finally, make sure your website reflects the fact you have a diverse team – new recruits are likely to research your company beforehand and they might be put off by photographs of the leadership team depicting all white males, for example. 

Broaden your recruiting sources

If you want to hire a more diverse group of people then you need to widen the candidate pool. To achieve diversity in your CX team, be open to both traditional and non-traditional methods of recruiting. To start with, word-of-mouth recommendations are likely to mean that you’re only hiring people who are like your existing employees, so this isn’t going to help with diversity. 

Be open to the fact that some of the best CX professionals may not have a college degree. Work with organizations that focus on industry-specific diversity, such as Black Women in Science & Engineering which supports black women to enter corporate or government STEM related jobs. 

Promote people internally 

Hire people across different levels, from service to management. You might have some particularly observant customer service reps that can share insight into your customers, or someone who has been a project lead for a new website. 

There are many individuals across your organization who might be a good fit for the CX team, so consider hiring in-house if you have open positions. 

Start from the top down

The responsibility for instigating change should not be down to HR – it starts with business leaders who should represent the values of diversity and inclusion. Accountability is a key factor when establishing a diverse culture and should be one of the top agenda items of the leadership team. 

Create a culture of inclusion

Create opportunities for your CX employees to learn more about each other as people, rather than staying at the surface level of coworkers. This is a great way to build a sense of trust and community in your team, and encourage employees to bring their whole self to work. It’s no good having diverse perspectives if you don’t actively encourage your team to share their thoughts and feelings. 

Final remarks

The benefits of creating a diverse work environment for your customer experience team go well beyond just trying to meet quotas. Having the right figures to show your company is diverse is one thing, but it’s more about cultivating an environment of inclusion to help your employees be their best selves. Not only will they be able to connect with a diverse customer base more easily, they will solve problems in a more creative way.

The post Diversity in Customer Experience: What, Why and How appeared first on Lumoa.

But what about employee experience? How does it feel to work for your company? Is it overall a positive, seamless, and rewarding experience? Or is it a toxic culture full of friction and negativity?

Customer experience has gotten attention for many years, but organizations are starting to realize the key to a world-class customer experience is nailing the employee experience first. After all, satisfied employees are more likely to create satisfied customers.

What is Employee Experience?

Denise Lee Yohn, author of FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies defines “employee experience” as the following:

Employee experience is the sum of everything an employee experiences throughout his or her connection to the organization — every employee interaction, from the first contact as a potential recruit to the last interaction after the end of employment.

As you can see, there are a lot of similar characteristics between customer experience and employee experience. In fact, the same definition works if you replace the word “employee” with “customer”:

Customer experience is the sum of everything a customer experiences throughout his or her connection to the organization — every customer interaction, from the first contact as a potential customer to the last interaction…

Customer experience is the perception a customer has of your organization, whereas employee experience is the perception an employee has of your organization. Both are important for attracting and retaining customers and employees.

A good employee experience promotes the success of the employees, not just the success of the company. That means providing the tools, environment, and culture for the organization’s employees to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. When employees win, customers win, and when customers win, the organization succeeds.

A study done by GrantThorton found that companies with healthy cultures are 1.5 times more likely to report average revenue growth of more than 15% for the past three years.

Employee experience is not just culture or engagement

Employee experience is more than a nice office and engaged employees. A modern, clean office with a stocked refrigerator, kombucha, and a ping-pong table is great, but you need more than that to round out the entire employee experience. What’s a fancy office if employees are stuck using out-dated clunky equipment or feeling trapped under a toxic manager?

Friendly people, office parties, and company retreats bring a lot of value to the employee experience, but these things alone don’t equal a good employee experience. These things are only a piece of the whole picture.

It takes all of these things (culture, environment, and tools) to create an amazing employee experience from end-to-end. If you’re doing two of these really well, you have work to do. It takes focus in each of these areas to really create an employee experience where people want to show up to work.

A shift in thinking

Organizations that get employee experience right are the ones figuring out how to make it so people want to show up to work. This isn’t how it’s always been though. There’s been a big shift in thinking over time.

The old school mentality is assuming that people need to come to work because they need a job. When organizations think like that, they provide the bare minimum for employees to get their work done.

Winning companies are shifting away from that way of thinking, and they’re creating places where people want to be. This is especially important as the average tenure of employees continues to decrease. Employers are challenged to figure out how to keep their employees. Employees who have a choice in when, where, and how they work have higher levels of satisfaction, innovation, and job performance, according to the Harvard Business Review. 

This comes down to much more than office space (whether it’s home office or public) and culture. It requires dialing in the entire employee experience and everything that goes into how an employee interacts with an organization: from submitting an application, showing up to work, working with your team, and participating in an exit interview. Programs like mentoring are integral to this experience. Mentoring platforms helps employees develop skills, build relationships, and feel supported, which enhances engagement and retention. By fostering growth opportunities and personal connections, mentoring ensures employees are more likely to stay and thrive within the company.

The three elements of employee experience

Physical space: Office spaces have transformed drastically over the years. From stuffy cubicles to open office spaces, the spaces where we do our work have a massive influence on our experience day-to-day. This includes things like the office location and layout, and amenities available to employees such as a kitchen, gym, and bike parking. You might even offer employees the chance to work from home, giving them more ownership over their work environment.

Tools: There is an endless number of workplace productivity tools available today. These are the tools that allow us to do our jobs. Some of them are great, some of them are horrible. They include things like our computers, phones, email systems, project management tools, collaboration and scheduling tools, recruiting tools and so much more.

Why employee experience is important

Just as outstanding customer experiences are pivotal in retaining customers, exceptional employee experiences begin with recruitment and are fundamental in retaining staff. Hiring new employees is not only costly but also time-consuming, akin to acquiring and onboarding new customers. Implementing a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and an Employer of Record service for recruitment can streamline this process, enhancing the initial employee experience. Maintaining the interest and engagement of existing employees through incredible employee experiences is crucial for the prosperity of any company.

The Employee Experience Index sums this up quite well:

Our research reveals that employees who experience a sense of belonging, purpose, achievement, happiness and vigor are more likely to perform at higher levels and contribute “above and beyond” expectations. They are also less likely to quit.

Focusing on the employee experience also helps organizations attract new talent. We’ve all heard nightmare stories about company X being a terrible place to work. Don’t be that company. Be the opposite. Be the company known for an amazing workplace experience and you’ll have people knocking at your door to come work for you. Your recruiting team will thank you!

It’s easier than ever to learn about a given company’s employee experience. Websites like Glassdoor, LinkedIn and even Twitter shed plenty of light on what it’s like to work for a given organization.

Improving your Employee Experience

Building a world-class employee experience takes time and money. It’s an investment in not only your employees but your company’s success. Leading companies are hiring dedicated roles and teams that focus on employee experience, and there are events and books focused on this topic. Culture Amp recommends four steps to getting started with employee experience:

1. Determine your top priority: Identify which part of the employee experience your company needs to focus on.
2. Start capturing data: Collect data such as eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) to help measure where the items in the top priority currently are.
3. Build-in linkages from the beginning: Design surveys based on existing feedback, and let future surveys inform each following survey.
4. Empower action: Share the feedback with leadership and hiring managers so they can make changes to the employee experience.

Conclusion

By providing the right combination of tools, culture and environment, you’ll be able to dial in a unique employee experience where people want to work with your organization. As you continue to build a team of satisfied employees, this satisfaction will trickle into the customers, and that’s when you’ll really win!

Today’s leading companies are cracking the code to figure out how to not only attract, but retain employees. If you’ve figured out how to make people want to show up to work day after day, you’ve nailed the employee experience.

It doesn’t stop there though. Continue gathering feedback from people who work at your organization and make regular modifications and improvements. Consider creating engaging training videos with the help of one of the best text-to-speech tools, enhancing the learning experience for your team. This approach allows you to compete effectively with others. Invest in your employee experience just as you invest in your customer experience: through research and insights, tools, internal trainings, culture, and providing an overall thriving and exciting place to work.

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