Editorial
The Gist
- Cycle of benefits. Symbiotic CX and EX strategies enhance both customer satisfaction and employee morale, resulting in a stronger bottom line.
- Reduce agent fatigue. Implementing proactive support and automation reduces contact center stress and turnover, fostering a healthier work environment.
- Empower with AI. Utilizing AI and data intelligence in customer interactions helps manage emotional labor and prevent burnout among employees.
You’ve probably seen these stats: happy employees fuel a stronger bottom line, and can help create happier customers, who in turn will create better business results. In fact, when focused on providing a good employee experience (EX), some organizations saw an immediate return on investment (ROI) of up to 150%. That is not a number that organizations can afford to ignore, in any kind of economy.
Traditionally, when we focus on how to enhance EX to improve the bottom line, we concentrate on a few specific controls like employee benefits, wellness initiatives and team building. While these are certainly a crucial part of the overall employee foundation, what if you could create a powerful symbiotic relationship in your organization, where good customer experience (CX) creates good EX, which results in even better CX, and so on in a virtuous cycle? This symbiotic mindset, over and above your baseline employee work environment, can elevate your entire organization.
CX and EX: The Toll of Customer Behavior on Employees
Keeping this powerful symbiotic relationship in mind, let’s delve into the biggest opportunities to address common challenges head-on to help the CX and EX virtuous cycle:
Volume: Shift Simple Inquiries Away from Customer Service Agents
Most contact center agents answer upwards of 100 calls per day, which impedes their ability to provide a personalized, engaged experience that can deliver a positive customer outcome. This isn’t the fault of the agents — there’s only so much you can do in the face of a tsunami.
Instead, organizations should divert call volume by proactively addressing customer needs. For instance, 48% of calls into the contact center are related to simple billing-related questions. Organizations should focus on shifting high-volume, simple inquiries away from their agents and toward automated digital technology. In turn, agents will then be able to spend time on more complex and interesting scenarios that will foster their growth and development.
Relate Article: Is It Time to Make CX and EX 'One Experience'?
Frustration: Get Ahead With Customer Journey Mapping
According to research on call center fatigue, more than one in five customers admit to yelling at (32%) or swearing at (24%) a call center agent. This is another instance where, by addressing the customer problem, you’ll support employee wellness as well.
Organizations can get ahead of some of that confusion and frustration with proactive customer journey mapping and seamless orchestration. By using more sophisticated tools that leverage generative AI to personalize and contextualize, customers can have their concerns addressed before they even reach a representative. Additionally, with better call direction, they can also reach the right representative first, minimizing the potential for an infuriating “let me transfer you” dance.
Related Article: CX and EX: Why Focusing Only on CX Is a Bad Idea
Emotional Contagion: Empower Customer Service Agents With Intelligence
One analysis clearly linked bad customer behavior and psychological strain on employees. Called the emotional contagion theory, negative or aggressive customer behavior causes employees to quickly experience negative emotions they may have trouble regulating. This piles on to the emotional labor employees are already expected to perform and leads to emotional exhaustion.
To address this, the key will be to empower employees with intelligence, both to better understand the customer and to address concerns quickly before the customer’s frustration grows. Organizations already have ample intelligence from data science teams and AI implementations, geared toward predicting customer behaviors and personalizing their journeys, but it’s just as important to get that intelligence into the hands of customer service agents.
Even the most well-trained employee will get frustrated with things out of their control like consistently angry customers. By proactively solving customer issues that lead to that frustration being taken out on customer service employees, you’re not just improving CX, you’re nipping real EX issues in the bud before they can cause a problem.
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The Business Consequences
Volume, customer anger and other factors lead to contact center agents experiencing high levels of stress and burnout that result in turnover. In fact, the average annual contact center turnover rate is 38%, but may be as high as 200% in some call centers. This level of turnover is expensive and hurts your company’s bottom line as well as employee morale. In fact, it costs an average of $20,000 to replace an employee who performs at an average level, and that’s not taking into account replacing managers, trainers or other high-value employees. It also has a ripple effect as remaining employees are tasked with more work and spread thin.
Organizations can solve this by proactively addressing customer concerns before they even think to call. They should also arm employees with tools that make them more efficient at their jobs, empowering them with solutions that support them having personalized, intelligent conversations to solve customer concerns as they come in. In turn, proactively curbing employee burnout and turnover will fuel a powerful customer experience and support engine.
No matter how excellent an employee journey is, a furious customer can take a hit on employee morale. In 2024, both customers and employees expect more from organizations. By understanding that the relationship between CX and EX is symbiotic, leaders can strengthen both.
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