Insights from Enterprise Connect: How CX and EX Integration Can Boost Your Business Outcomes

Tighter integration between customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) systems is emerging as a strategic imperative for organizations.

And why not? It offers benefits from retention and loyalty to innovation and problem-solving among frontline, back-office and customer-facing workers.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Here’s the real question. How do you achieve this integration, and how does the enterprise leverage it to secure the promised benefits?

I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion about this topic at Enterprise Connect recently in Orlando. Led by Omdia’s Mila D’Antonio, Principal Analyst, and Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, this session explored how tighter integration between CX and EX systems is rapidly becoming a must for organizations.

These two leading analysts discussed the tools and platforms required for this integrated strategy—and what IT must do to deliver functionality to support the strategy.

These Omdia analysts shared data insights from their reports and research on CX and EX, reviewed survey highlights, and shared some imperatives for successful integration such as building better cohesion between CX and EX to deliver needed benefits, including cost optimization and enhanced customer experience.

Attendees gained a clearer understanding of how peers are confronting challenges that may stall CX and EX enhancement and integration—and what can be done to adapt and improve in their enterprises.

Given most of you probably didn’t make it to Enterprise Connect (maybe next year?), I’d like to share some takeaways with you and answer some questions you may have.

Q: Why does integrating employee and customer experience create a competitive advantage?

A: EX and CX are tightly intertwined, so it is almost impossible to achieve significant gains in CX without improving EX. Also, when CX drops, that typically affects frontline EX employees. By combining EX and CX strategy and platform, companies gain a significant strategic competitive advantage—while reducing costs.

Q: What factors shape the integration of EX and CX?

A: It begins with executive ownership of both CX and EX. To effectively execute the strategy, organizations must adopt an open platform that has the right CX and EX data that can automate workflows across the enterprise.

Organizations that are focused purely on CX and treat VOC as a separate function—typically with a separate point solution for surveys—have a much harder time integrating CX and EX and gaining the strategic benefits of doing so.

Q: Describe some strategies for creating integration and collaboration.

A: We recommend that strategic leadership look holistically at CX and EX across the enterprise and look for an effective CX automation platform that combines behavioral data. This data includes direct customer feedback, indirect and inferred behavioral feedback from all channels, and front- and back-office employee performance data. This combination provides the relevant correlation and causation between EX and CX.

Q: Why are streamlined data-driven insights important?

A: Behavioral data is the key to impacting and automating CX and EX. Organizations typically have this data in various silos. Some data lies dormant, and some is processed with point solutions—making it extremely challenging to see the big picture and drive action. To achieve CX and EX automation, organizations need to adopt an open platform that allows the flow of critical behavioral data in and out, with a unified, AI-driven solution to analyze data-driven insights.

Q: How do workflow automation and orchestration platforms enable CX and EX integration?

A: Once an organization adopts an open platform with behavioral data and AI at the core, the next step is automating the actions based on these insights. An enterprise-wide CX automation platform can use AI and the relevant behavioral data to drive and automate actions—allowing much higher levels of CX and EX with significantly lower costs, and rapid ROI.

Q: How can my organization overcome cultural hurdles in integrating EX and CX?

A: Employees need to know that companies care about their well-being just as much as they care about customers’ well-being. Employees need to feel that they can embrace a culture of customer focus—ideally, organizations should also align employee success to customer success.

For example, many organizations have a separate internal quality program, and a separate external VOC CX program. An open platform enables companies to bring these two programs together and view the relevant behavioral data side-by-side, thus aligning the internal EX quality to the external CX.

Learn more.