Editorial
The Gist
- Empathy matters more than ever. A deep understanding of both customers and employees significantly boosts a company's success.
- Interconnected voices elevate businesses. The symbiotic relationship between VOC and VOE drives mutual growth and enhances overall satisfaction.
- Insightful metrics uncover truths. Diligently tracking the impacts of VOC and VOE offers critical insights that inform strategic business decisions.
In today's competitive marketplace, few monopolies exist. Companies must fiercely compete for market share, profitability and customer loyalty. Understanding and harnessing both the voice of the customer (VOC) and the voice of the employee (VOE) is crucial. Both concepts are grounded in empathy and are interconnected, significantly impacting a company's success.
What is VOC, VOE and Empathy?
Voice of the Customer (VOC):
This is a comprehensive strategy capturing the customer experience: the preferences, expectations and feedback of customers regarding a product or service. It involves gathering insights through various methods such as surveys, feedback forms, social media and direct interactions.
Analyzing voice of the customer helps businesses tailor their offerings to meet customer needs, enhance satisfaction and build brand loyalty. Companies that utilize user-centered design have been proven to outperform the S&P 500 index by more than 200%. Infragistics published a comprehensive overview of the various areas of a business where user-centered design has an impact — including sales, support and development.
Related Article: Voice of the Customer: What Is It and Why Does It Matter for CX?
Voice of the Employee (VOE):
This is the equivalent to VOC but focused internally on the employee experience: understanding the perspectives, experiences and sentiment of employees within an organization. This involves creating a conducive work environment where employees feel valued and empowered to share their insights. VOE initiatives can include surveys and focus groups to gauge employee sentiment.
Reaching back at least 30 years, studies have shown how important employee satisfaction is not just for the health but also the wealth of a company. For example, a Wharton School of Business report states that employee satisfaction is positively correlated with shareholder returns.
Related Article: Why Voice of the Employee Is as Important as Voice of the Customer
Empathy:
In general, this is the capacity of people to walk in the shoes of others, to understand other people’s feelings, sentiments, opinions and motivations. This viewpoint plays a major role in user-centered product and service design. What do our customers need? How can we make their lives easier? It also has an internal-facing dimension: a constant balancing of a company’s need to make profit, and the needs of its employees for a pleasant work environment, career growth and self-fulfillment.
While for individual people empathy is typically regarded as a character trait one inherently does or doesn’t have, in an organization, empathy has to be orchestrated and made part of the overall operating system.
Related Article: Bridging the Empathy Gap With Customers
The Interconnection: Employee Satisfaction Drives Customer Satisfaction
Research and case studies consistently emphasize the strong correlation between employee experience and customer experience. Organizations with happy and engaged employees typically find that these positive sentiments extend to interactions with customers. When employees are satisfied with their roles, they are more likely to deliver superior customer service, efficiently solve problems and go the extra mile to meet customer needs.
Further, engaged employees naturally become brand ambassadors. When employees believe in the company's mission, values, and products or services, they convey enthusiasm and authenticity in their interactions with customers. This authenticity positively influences the customer experience, leading to enhanced satisfaction, trust and loyalty.
A Harvard Business Review article summarizes the relationship between profitability, customer loyalty, and employee satisfaction for service organizations like this:
“Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees. Employee satisfaction, in turn, results primarily from high-quality support services and policies that enable employees to deliver results to customers.”
Another important aspect of this interconnection is the feedback loop that customer-facing employees can provide. Sales and customer service staff gain valuable insights and feedback from customers. When these employees feel valued and empowered, they are more likely to share nuanced information outside the ordinary with the company. This continuous flow of information then enables companies to make well-informed and customer-focused decisions, adapt their strategies and consistently improve the customer experience.
Non-customer-facing employees, too, can contribute to iteratively optimizing the customer experience. Product improvement ideas like suggested new features or usability improvements can be gathered through the same methods that are used for external customers, e.g., usability tests or surveys. Or when bold new features are being introduced, they’re first released to internal users in order to gauge their effect on productivity and satisfaction. Making use of VOE is not done instead of VOC, it’s done in tandem, especially in earlier stages of the product development cycle.
Measuring the Connectedness Between VOE on VOC
Establishing and upkeeping VOC and VOE is already challenging. On top of it, measuring the impact of the employee experience on the customer experience can be complex, as well. Setting meaningful metrics and KPIs to accomplish this requires alignment across departments and continuous execution and tracking of measurements.
Here are a few measures that can be utilized:
- Correlating customer feedback with employee feedback: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an established metric that measures the likelihood of customers recommending a product, service, or company to others. A lesser known counterpart for employees exists in the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), asking employees of the likelihood of recommending their workplace to others. A positive correlation between NPS and eNPS would suggest that engaged employees contribute to better customer satisfaction.
- Correlating customer feedback with specific employee interactions: If, for example, positive customer comments align with interactions handled by highly satisfied tech support employees, this indicates a positive interconnection.
- Correlating employee productivity with employee satisfaction: Metrics like the average resolution time for customer support tickets can be correlated with the satisfaction levels of the support staff. Positive correlations would indicate that improved productivity results from happy employees.
- Correlating shared purpose with customer satisfaction: Surveys assessing the employees' understanding of and alignment with the company’s brand values can tell if a shared purpose exists. Correlating these results with customer satisfaction metrics can reveal the impact on customer perceptions.
- Correlating the impact of employee training with customer satisfaction: There should be employee training programs focusing on a customer centric approach. The impact of these programs on customer interactions and the resulting customer satisfaction can then be assessed.
Final Thoughts
The interconnectedness between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction is a powerful driver of business outcomes. Understanding customer preferences, expectations and feedback through VOC, coupled with insights into the employee experience through VOE, creates a holistic approach to company success.
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Both VOC and VOE rely on the same method set that is in the user-centered design research tool box: surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability testing. Empathy serves as the foundation, and metrics allow for measuring and tracking progress toward an integrated approach that puts humans in the center of all considerations.
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