Editorial
The Gist
- Revenue growth connection. A strong customer-centric culture is directly linked to increased revenue by aligning employee efforts with business objectives.
- Enhancing employee engagement. Cultivating a customer-centric culture helps employees feel valued and connected to the company's success, leading to improved overall engagement.
- Leverage composable solutions. Adopting composable tools enhances operational flexibility and allows organizations to improve customer-centric strategies.
Customer-centric cultures perform. Creating an engaged, customer-obsessed culture requires digital employee experience investments that are no less important than external, market-focused digital transformations.
Two important facts support this thesis. For one, culture is directly correlated to revenue growth. With an understanding of how employees’ work aligns with business goals, empowered colleagues are vital to transitioning “future of work” programs into a portfolio of growth and transformation investments. By providing clarity into how a given work effort contributes to an overarching growth goal, managers help employees focus their energy and give them a reason to feel proud of their contributions.
The second key fact to remember is that orchestration and interoperability allow organizations to perform well with less internal friction and lower investments. New platforms have emerged that are increasingly interoperable and can be orchestrated by marketers and employee engagement teams instead of IT. This allows digital engagement leaders to be less dependent on all-in-one technology providers and IT partners.
Martech and HR tech interoperability ultimately enables autonomy over previously siloed data and tools, and it gives business leaders the ability to govern what was previously unmanageable. Employee engagement systems can now be composed inexpensively so that teams can operate effectively without having to be burdened by IT-centric digital experiences.
Building a Customer-Centric Culture
Why do some organizations still fail to empower employees and achieve a strong customer-centric culture?
The rise of remote work in recent years revealed that monolithic all-in-one systems — those encompassing everything including data structures, tools, user interfaces and more— were behind the times. Workers had been trained to conform to the way the system was designed, which minimized efficiency, added specialized departments to navigate irregularities and caused frustration throughout the organization.
A lot has changed in the past several years — more remote work, the rise of tech savvy workers, the introduction of better tools and the digitalization of key processes.
Still, organizations have not prioritized employee experience as they should. Businesses focused on customer experience have begun to abandon monoliths in favor of composable tools that can easily be integrated so that customers are no longer beholden to the constraints of a single platform.
Composable digital solutions have already improved the digital customer experience, and organizations can also enhance their employee engagement systems by embracing two key models:
Composability
Composable, decoupled and MACH (microservices, APIs, cloud-native and headless) architectures are solving today’s complex business problems. These solutions bring businesses multiple advantages, including speed to market, greater flexibility, better return on IT investment and increased capacity to innovate.
Companies are no longer beholden to one single vendor, and they can break each problem into parts and assemble the best available composable solution stack using the “best-fit” components. Composability significantly accelerates time to market, empowering marketing, product and IT teams to make quick decisions when launching new digital products, websites and campaigns or overhauling user experiences — all which are tied to revenue or competitive market share.
Artificial Intelligence
When used correctly, AI can help employees be more efficient or keep the spark of creativity alive. It can provide data-driven insights such as the best time, channel and format to reach various audience segments. AI-powered chatbots can analyze customer data and provide highly personalized and relevant responses, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty — a huge win for employees and the organization overall.
AI can also be a creative collaborator. Whether you’re asking ChatGPT for brainstorming exercises or using AI to help refine drafts, AI’s ability to create at scale is a powerful tool for personalization and plays a role in organizational growth.
Related Article: Is It Time to Make CX and EX 'One Experience'?
Innovating Employee Engagement in Your Organization
It’s time to think differently about the operating models, governance and applications supporting customer-centric culture and employee engagement. Rather than concentrating on functional areas, we need a mental model that helps us to understand the capabilities required to empower employees and help teams thrive.
To think differently, you must act differently. When it comes to transitioning to a new way of doing business, start small. The beacon approach involves identifying, defining and executing a small, self-contained project that can serve as a microcosm of the larger undertaking. It aligns stakeholders, builds employee confidence and morale and delivers real-world results. The beacon serves to illuminate the better way forward.
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Stop thinking about employee engagement in terms of HR or internal communications needs. Instead, think of the critical element of flexible, intelligent business technology that constantly inspires employees and teams to support growth. This will benefit themselves, their clients and their company.
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