A winning synergy for tomorrow's businesses: including employees in improving the company's operations and customer experience. With Claire Bonniol, co-founder and CEO of CXB HUB.

At the beginning of her professional life, Claire Bonniol worked for the European Social Fund on topics of social innovation, human resources innovation and training. Driven by a multicultural and international vision, Claire Bonniol continued her journey with the Accor Group for 10 years, a group within which her management, employee training and customer service missions reinforced her convictions: good management of the employee experience is a formidable asset to ensure a good customer experience. Claire is now Co-Founder and Managing Director of CXB HUB , a company based in the United Kingdom and France, specializing in successful customer and employee experiences. We meet her today so she can talk to us about the importance for companies to improve their employee experience, at a time when employee retention is becoming a real challenge for employers.

Can you define what employee engagement is? Why is it important today?

Right now it's a trendy topic, but it's not a new topic. Since the beginning of time, if we have a collaborator, we need him to be engaged in what he does. Engagement is important because it reflects a degree of motivation, involvement, satisfaction, well-being, whether in relation to the job that the collaborator does, or in relation to the company.

There are several numbers from the 2020 Forrester study that help understand the strength of employee engagement:

• A company that has a high employee experience rate will be twice as likely to achieve annual growth of more than 10%.
• Companies with a high employee experience score are 24 times more likely to deliver a good customer experience.
• When you have a high employee experience score, you are 9 times more likely that employees will recommend the company they work for.

We can now measure that a positive employee experience has an impact on the quality of the customer experience.

These figures show the impact of the employee experience in terms of productivity, creativity, profitability and company value. We know that one of the reasons why employees are loyal to their company is when there is a good atmosphere with colleagues, and/or when there is a good relationship with the manager. And very often, we leave a company when we have a bad relationship with our manager. From a quality of service point of view, if we experience a difficult climate in our company, it is extremely difficult to be very proactive, very friendly with the customer, because we are simply suffering. So yes, there are impacts, and the return on investment figures help to reassure and encourage action.

Since the start of the pandemic, have you observed a change in companies' attitudes towards these issues? Has it become a more important concern for companies?

It's true that this is a major concern, and in the world of experience management, it's the key topic for 2022. It has become very important because companies have not invested enough in employee experience until now. For many of them, it's only since the pandemic that they've started to write employee journeys, to listen in a structured way to what employees have to say. This translates into surveys, working groups, and detailed analysis of verbatim comments to really understand what's being said. Because if we don't listen to employees, we can't take the right measures for their well-being.

With the pandemic, we have lost some of our social contact. It is now a whole re-education process to do in order to live well in a company. When in contact with colleagues, we can read on their faces when someone starts to get angry, see that when we expressed ourselves, we were not understood, or more positively, we can somehow be radiated by the smile of the person opposite us, and build ourselves up thanks to that. If we are at a distance or wear a mask all the time, these points of reference are lost.

What happens when companies come to you? What are their problems?

These companies of all sizes and from all sectors have issues with employee turnover, job satisfaction, how to keep employees and make them more invested. There are also issues of skills acquisition, that is to say accelerating the rise in expertise, ensuring that someone who arrives is more quickly good at what they do. There are also managerial issues, such as renovating the management style so that it supports the company's customer culture. We provide a lot of support around these issues. For example, we have managers write down employee career paths, which obviously leads to a very strong awareness. Someone who arrives in a company must be able to very easily and very quickly understand what is expected. We will describe the 20% of situations that will help resolve 80% of cases in fact, and then it is human intelligence that does the rest.

Can you give us some concrete examples of action plans that you have carried out with companies?

There are two angles to work on the employee experience. First, we need to develop cooperation and therefore involve employees at all levels in the success of the customer experience. We will organize and lead workshops for reflection and production, by employees, of what the customer experience should be.

In this example, it is not called employee experience, but it is, because it is deeply educational. First, we give importance to what employees want to do for customers, so we get them to think, to put themselves in the other person's shoes before doing anything. Everyone wants to do their job well, and to provide a real service to their customer. For example, we ran workshops in a large American engineering company. Thanks to the work we did with them, they increased the company's "customer orientation" maturity by 60% in one year, which we measure with a specific tool, myCXvision. We have also worked in retirement homes, where the job is difficult to do, and involving all employees to improve the customer experience helps to develop the spirit of innovation and think about the service provided with a different vision than that of the caregiver's job.

The second angle is the construction of employee journeys, we have done this with the same clients. For example, we have reviewed the entire process of welcoming and integrating new employees, to make it something much more memorable. We script this experience throughout the employee's journey.

There is a third axis that is important, which is that we train coaches who will be customer culture referents for employees, like what we did for an energy company. Having a reference person to always have the right tone and good quality of service with their customer by phone and email provides a framework and a safeguard for both the advisor and the company. This referent can help the advisor prepare for a difficult interview, or react afterward when something has gone wrong, and be better equipped for the next time. In terms of personal development, it is fundamental and it provides a real sense of well-being at work.

What tools do you recommend or use with your clients to establish a strategy and measure the impact of the actions implemented?

We have set up an analysis tool called MyCXVision that we make available to our clients. This tool allows you to make a cross-evaluation of your company's customer culture, and to monitor the evolution of this culture over time and according to the initiatives that the tool suggests to implement.

For some of our clients, we create and build custom tools. For a big name in travel, we created an app that allows employees to participate in improving the customer journey. First, a service repository was built, which answers the following questions: how to behave, what to do with customers in a given situation depending on the degree of urgency or disruption at the precise moment… These actions are listed in the application, and employees can suggest changes.

We produce these digital tools, but we also write charters and an operational version of strategic documents: the guide, the orientations, the benchmarks to properly deliver quality of service.

For me, customer experience and employee experience are two intrinsically linked subjects. We must not limit employee engagement and experience to a subject of well-being at work. For us, this is a bit counterproductive. I have been working on these subjects for years, and what I systematically observe is that as an employee, we expect above all to provide a service, to be useful, to feel useful, and that is how we achieve our goals…and perhaps we feel happy.