MC: 0:00

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action. One, two, three, four.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

Customer experience, employee experience, user experience what does it all mean? That's what we're talking about today on the Experience Action Podcast with yours truly, Jeannie Walters, thanks to this fantastic question.

Listener Question: 0:48

Peter from the Gold Coast in Australia sent us the following: Hi, Jeannie, I really enjoy watching your podcasts on YouTube as well as reading your posts on LinkedIn (Thank you). Therefore, I'd like to ask if you've ever outlined the differences between employee experience, customer experience and user experience in one podcast. I'd be very interested to understand how they all relate to providing a great shopping experience to consumers and helping suppliers and retailers to become customer-centric. Thanks in advance and I look forward to your thoughts, Peter.

Jeannie Walters: 1:18

Thank you so much, Peter, for submitting this question, because I think it's something that a lot of organizations and people grapple with. I often will introduce myself and explain that I work in customer experience and people use certain phrases interchangeably. They say, oh yeah, I was on the user experience team, or you know, my focus is employee experience. So it's the same. And the answer is yes and no. There are certainly similarities between these three modalities, if you will, but we have to really make sure that we understand what are we all talking about here. So here's how I would approach it. When we're talking about customer experience, we're really talking about the culmination of every single touchpoint a customer has with your brand. Now, this starts way before they become a customer. We're talking about awareness when they first see a sign with your brand name on it, when they hear from a friend about a great experience they had, when they happen to be browsing on their phone, most likely and see an ad or see somebody post something. There are all sorts of different ways that we are now exposed to different brands, so we want to make sure that we start the customer journey. When we think about customer experience, it starts there. It goes all the way through to when they leave you, when they are deciding and decide that you know what they're going to go with a competitor instead. Or maybe when they stay with you for years and years and years and recommend to all of their friends why your brand is the tops. Well, this is really what customer experience is, and some of you have heard me say that customer experience, it happens whether you're intentional or not. So our job as CX leaders is to be intentional and proactive in designing the right experiences to help somebody move through that journey with less effort, with less annoyance, with less frustration, and make sure that they get what they need. They want to achieve a goal, feel a certain way or really just get to that next step as a customer. Our job is to help design the experience proactively and intentionally so that they continue through that journey. So when we talk about customer experience, we really are talking about that culmination.

Jeannie Walters: 3:38

Now, sometimes we refer to customer experience as CX and sometimes people say, well, CX is really about the perception of the brand and I would say the perception is a result of customer experience. So, yes, perception is key. This is what helps people feel confident and reassured and ready to take that next step with you. However, we cannot control all of their perception. People are coming into the experience with their own life experiences, their own judgments, their own values, their own cultural references, so we have to respect that as much as we can design things with the intentionality of eliciting certain emotions, helping them through that process, we really cannot control what happens with perception. So I have a little bit of an issue when people say that customer experience is actually the perception of the brand. The experience is happening. It is happening whether we are designing it or not. The perception is actually the result of those experiences. So that's what customer experience is that big umbrella about every single touchpoint. Whether they're walking into a store, they're calling your contact center, they're interacting with your site online or a mobile app, or they just are opening up a box and receiving a product. All of those touch points, every single way that they interact with your brand. That is included in the customer experience.

Jeannie Walters: 5:12

Now, employee experience takes a lot of the best practices and best ideas from customer experience and we can apply them in a similar way. Employees are going to have an experience, no matter what. If they have signed up to work at your organization and they are in it, then that means that they are experiencing it on their terms, really. What employee experience is about, it's the same idea. What can we do to understand what are the needs of our employees at certain points in their journey? Whether it's about a specific role or maybe the tenure that they've had with your organization, or maybe just some sort of shift where you are launching a new product and you need a new type of employee. So employee experience is really about how we design the journey for those employees. What can we do to help them take that next step in their career? What can we do to help them feel supported and empowered as employees so that they want to stay longer, they want to contribute more, they want to be more productive? All of those things are the results of a well crafted, intentional, proactive employee experience. So the employees are having an experience. Your customers are having an experience. We, as CX leaders, are trying to do our best to be intentional and proactive about that and to design on behalf of those customers and employees.

Jeannie Walters: 6:37

So who are these users we're talking about when we talk about user experience or UX. Well, UX is a term that really kind of came out of the digital age. A lot of people think that this is specifically around digital interaction points, and in some organizations, that's exactly what it is. Now, when we talk about user experience, a lot of times we are talking about those interfaces where customers are interacting directly with a machine of some sort. So this could be a kiosk at the self-pay checkout line in the grocery store, this could be a mobile app, this could be a survey that we send them that they are filling out on their desktop. All of those places where we don't have an employee, where we don't have those barriers, where it's really about the digital interface and the person using the interface. That is often referred to as user experience.

Jeannie Walters: 7:34

However, I believe the umbrella can be bigger on this, because there are oftentimes where our customers are interacting with our products or our services, in some cases on their own. We're not there anymore. We've sold it to them and it's up to them to figure it out Right now, because, if you don't already know this, our podcast is on YouTube now, so check that out. But because of that, I am using lots of different equipment here. I'm using a camera, I'm using a microphone, I'm using lights, and all of those things have a user experience as well. If I can't figure something out on my own, if something takes too many steps to get it to the right setting, all of that impacts the user experience.

Jeannie Walters: 8:18

So we really do have to think about this in an interconnected way, which is why I love this question, Peter, because essentially, what you're asking is how can we look at all of these pieces individually and together, so that we can provide the best experience, not just for our customers, but also through our suppliers, through our retailers, through our employees? All of that is so important. So when we talk about the interconnection of all of this, we really have to consider that we cannot always be all things to all people. We cannot be that CX leader who is in charge of the user experience of every digital touchpoint, and we're in charge of the employee experience, of making sure that their journey is okay, and we're in charge of making sure all this is connected. That can be a recipe for disaster. So what I would ask you, as a CX leader, to do when you're thinking about this interconnectivity is to start from who you're trying to serve and multiply that by what you're trying to do. So let me explain that.

Jeannie Walters: 9:23

If you are asked to really look at and make sure that you are providing a world-class customer experience employee experience, user experience, no matter what, the only way to really make sense of that type of aspiration or goal is to take a step back and define what the goal actually is. What does it look like? How do we know if we got there? What do we do to make better decisions along the way to that goal? What is the information we need? What are the insights we need?

Jeannie Walters: 9:55

So let's say and I can relate to this, this is me considering a project that we worked on, let's say you have field employees, folks that go out in the field. Maybe they drive trucks, maybe they do repairs, maybe they're just in different stores throughout the region that you're in. So you have people out in the world interacting either directly or indirectly with customers. Now, they probably have tools that they use, so they might be carrying around handy dandy tablets that help them when they record what happened with a customer or in a situation. Maybe they have point of sale systems, maybe they have all sorts of things that help them get their jobs done. So they, the employees, have that user experience in the field. Every single one of those has a user experience and an employee experience, and the result of that is a customer experience. So if you, as a customer experience leader, are asked to figure that out, what I would suggest is that you actually say, hey, let's figure out what is happening from the customer's perspective and then backtrack and figure out how can we make it easier for the field employees. What are the tools they need? Do we need to improve the user experience?

Jeannie Walters: 11:16

One of the best tools in the toolkit for this is service blueprinting. This is where you really look at what is the ideal experience that we're trying to provide for customers. What are the people, process, tools and technology we need to deliver that, and are those working as optimally as we want them to be? Do employees have the right information at the right moment? Is our data in the right place for the right employees to provide for them? What happens when that tablet goes down? Do we have another way that an employee could serve a customer in that moment? Is that user experience really working for those employees? What can they tell us about it? What's happening with the processes and tools that maybe we don't even see? You know, a lot of times we rely on things like credit card processors and we don't really talk about if they're working. This is a great example of thinking through those layers of customer experience, employee experience and user experience through a service blueprint to make sure that you can really look at each point and ask is this working in the best possible way to deliver a convenient, fast, effortless, beautiful experience for our customers?

Jeannie Walters: 12:37

Now, again, this all relates back to who you are and what you're trying to do. Saying that we want to deliver exceptional customer experiences is not really a goal. Your goal, your vision, has to be unique to you and your customers. What does exceptional mean? And so, once you figure that out, then you can start seeing places in the journey where you know what customers are complaining about this. Something we're doing with repairs is giving us feedback that the customers aren't happy with. Let's figure that out. Well, we talked to the employees and they said yeah, you know what. I have to sit there and fill out all this paperwork before I can actually complete the repair. It drives our customers crazy.

Jeannie Walters: 13:21

Well, what if we sped up that process. What if we provided more tools? What if we improved the user experience for that employee? That would actually have a direct result on our customers. And what would happen if we could make more repairs in a day? Well, we would probably save some expenses. We would have happier customers who are getting repairs faster.

Jeannie Walters: 13:42

So everything we do in customer experience, we have to really think about it in this layered approach. What will it do for our organization, what will it do for our customers and how can we make it the best possible experience as possible for our employees and then anybody who is interacting with some sort of product or digital experience directly? How can we make that user experience the best it can possibly be? So when there is synergy between retailers, vendors, suppliers, employees, the digital team, your contact center, your product team, that's when the magic happens. It is so much easier to talk about this than to do it. I know some of you right now, listening to this today, are thinking about specific examples that are making your job harder to get this done. It happens.

Jeannie Walters: 14:36

So the best you can do as a CX leader is to continually come back to that vision you have, to make sure that you understand what is it we're trying to do and help everybody else understand that they have a role to play in getting there. And if you can achieve that vision for your customers, make sure you know exactly what that will do for your organization. Make sure you talk about the way that you know what happier customers, we're going to get more referrals. If we get more referrals, do we have the right team to actually deal with those at the pace that we need to deal with it? We need to constantly think one step ahead and then also bring back that return on investment.

Jeannie Walters: 15:23

Well, if we get more referrals, we won't have to do cold calling quite as much to get the same results.

Jeannie Walters: 15:30

What would that mean from an expense or resource perspective? We are strategic thinkers. That is the most important skill a customer experience leader can have, truly. So I love this question because, Peter, you are clearly a strategic thinker, you are clearly looking ahead and you are clearly looking for these synergies, which is so, so important. So I hope that you will keep communicating that, keep empowering the people who are delivering on these things and let them know how important it is to really work directly and collaboratively together on behalf of our customers.

Jeannie Walters: 16:08

What a fantastic question. I love hearing these from you, so don't forget that you can always leave me a voicemail at askjeannie. vip. That's Jeannie with two N's. I'm so appreciative of everything you do and the way that you show up and listen, week after week. We are here for you, so leave us a message. Check out our site at experienceinvestigators. com and I hope to see you, at least, or maybe you can hear me next time. Thanks everybody. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators. com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more, and please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.