How a leading UK bank is connecting its customer and employee experience

You won’t find many organizations that deny the importance of their employees to delivering fantastic customer experience.

Employees are one of the core components of your brand; the creators of your product; the people working directly with your customers.

However, paying lip service to the importance of employees and truly understanding how they impact on your customer experience are two separate things.

One of the UK’s biggest banks - anonymized in this blog - understands just how important employees can be for CX. But it doesn’t just know it, it can show you the data to prove it.

In the last few months, it’s dug into its CX and EX data to pinpoint the things that matter most to customers and employees.

And beyond that, it’s connected up the dots to see how improving employee experience can impact customer retention and satisfaction.

“Now we’re using these insights as a powerful blueprint for delivering for employees and customers,” says the company’s head of colleague experience.

Starting with the employees

Employee experience equals everything a worker learns, does, sees and feels at each stage of the employee lifecycle - from looking at a job ad, to exiting the company.

The bank has boiled down its employee experience to 99 attributes, spanning everything from work-life balance to views on leadership.

Digging into its EX data enabled it to find the eight most important drivers of superior employee experience out of those 99 attributes.

These are the eight things that - when the bank gets things right - employee experience skyrockets. But when things go wrong, employee experience takes a bigger hit.

“This deep analysis of our employee data shows us where our strengths were, and where we could go even further,” says their head of colleague experience.

With this insight, managers are able to take the right actions, based on a more reliable, data-led view of what their employees want.

Uncovering what customers want

Once the bank had cracked what its employees wanted most and what drove up engagement, it turned its attention to customers.

Like with employees, the bank uncovered the five things that had the biggest impact on customers’ likelihood of recommending the brand to others.

“Knowing what matters most to our customers enables us to focus our attention on the right things,” says their head of colleague experience.

“Every organization has finite resources, so knowing what will move the needle most is invaluable.”

The bank’s analysis went beyond just showing what mattered to customers. It could actually quantify the impact on NPS of taking certain actions.

“The analysis showed us the exact impact of a one point improvement in certain CX attributes on our Net Promoter Score.

“With this information, it’s easier to predict return on investment and make the business case for extra investment in customer experience,” says the bank’s head of colleague experience.

The sweet spot: combining CX and EX

The bank knows it’s only the first step to break down what matters most to employees and customers. Things take off when you work out the relationship between the two.

What do employees need to deliver for customers. And what do customers want from their interactions with your workforce.

“We had the eight most important things to employees, and the five most important things to customers, but you’re missing a trick looking at those things in isolation.”

Linking its CX and EX data uncovered how the bank could improve its employee experience to increase the experience for its customers. A few clear actions emerged:

• Facilitate better collaboration - customer-facing colleagues who said there was "Good collaboration" between employees were more likely to be rated high on "Delivering on expectations" by customers
• Promote sharing and open feedback - customer-facing colleagues who said "People can speak up" at the bank were more likely to be rated high on "Ease of doing business" by customers
• Share the leadership’s vision - customer-facing colleagues who gave "Leadership vision" a low rating were more likely to have a lower NPS from their customers

“This kind of insight gives us a blueprint for what we should be focusing on, and gives our managers a clear idea of what their team needs to master.”