By Nnamdi Odumody
The expected optimal focus of organizations in today’s rapidly changing world is how to deliver unique customer experiences while making sure that their employees are motivated as well. The customer and employee experiences should function interpedently to ensure great outcomes in line with organizational strategic goals.
Yet, in some firms while being fixated on ensuring wonderful customer experiences, they tend to neglect their employees even as digital transformation is implemented in the organization’s operations to drive efficiency. When employees of Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer for leading consumer electronics technology brands, protested some few years ago over the harsh conditions of labour they were subjected to, its founder and then CEO, Terry Gou, stated that he would replace them with robots.
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While robotics can enable his organization achieve partial efficiency, firing about a million employees wouldn’t solve the problem which he had failed to solve: making sure that his employees are always happy. Through effective management of the customer experience and the employee experience, organizations gain competitive advantage than their competitors. Anyone that overlooks that interplay will not build any durable competitive entity. To win this interface redesign, a Chief Experience Officer (CXO) may be needed.
A chief experience officer (CXO) is an executive who ensures positive interactions with an organization’s external customers. The job title “chief experience officer” is increasingly replacing that of Chief Customer Officer in retail and entertainment industries and Chief Activity Officer in healthcare and travel
The Chief Experience Officer is saddled with integrating the customer experience and employee experience to deliver successful outcomes for the enterprise. The separation of both the customer experience and employee experience leads in the enterprise breeding competitions for attention and resources. The implication is that the organization can derail on its core objectives.
The Chief Experience Officer will help in making the employees to understand the customers to serve them better. The incumbent will also make the organization’s leadership to understand their employees, creating an ecosystem to deliver wonderful experiences to both the customers and employees. This symbiotic relationship creates a connection between the customer experience and employee experience.
Largely, the grand roadmap for the CXO is to advocate for the integration and championing of customers and employees perspectives in the C-Suite, measure the impacts of the customer experience on employees, as well as the employee experience on customers. More so, the CXO examines how all the customer and employee satisfaction impacts the organization’s key performance indicators.
Nigerian organizations need to create the Chief Experience Officer roles to ensure that the organization’s responsibilities to its employees and customers are aligned to create positive outcomes.
Maybe we start by treating those who work with us and for us with some dignity, and not seeing them as numbers or lower animals we are just helping to become humans. Many businesses don’t even have any identifiable culture, and there is always a big difference in the treatment of employees at the head office and those in branch offices.
In the banking sector, you need to see how some of the branch heads abuse their employees in the marketing/sales department, all in the name of pushing to hit targets. When people dread attending weekly meetings or going to work, then something is wrong with the employee experience.
Again, we are legendary at lumping four different job roles for one person, just to cut cost. And for some executives, it doesn’t matter how the workloads affect the employee, as long as he/she is doing them (and dying there), they are fine with it, whether optimally done or not.
Any organisation that believes it can deliver excellent customer experience, while treating its employees as subhumans needs to think again. You do not ask a hungry man to deliver food to someone (whom you think you care about) who is also hungry in a far away land, obviously the food is not going to get to approved destination.
“Any organisation that believes it can deliver excellent customer experience, while treating its employees as subhumans needs to think again.” This is a message to African CEOs. We are yet to build institutions where employees are seen as assets.