Needing to balance both customer and colleague experiences brings with it the concept of prioritising a 'total experience’, which can benefit each group – as well the organisation as a whole.
I was excited to attend the CCA Industry Council in the amazing London Gherkin recently, generously hosted by Poly, an organisation that produces headsets for customer service environments. We enjoyed an eye-opening summary of the Gallup report State of the Global Workplace 2022, insightfully delivered by Jeremie Brecheisen, MD.
And against the backdrop of this comprehensive survey, we reflected together on how employees feel about their work and their lives is an important predictor of organisational resilience and performance.
CCA presented highlights from their recent market report and, led by the amazing Jo Mayer, MD, Head of Specialist Services at Barclays, we debated solutions to what we agreed are key current challenges to all customer experience-delivering organisations.
The current high employment labour market
The crucial question here was, how can we best attract and retain the right teams? Along with, how can we best support our important front-line teams to ensure we remain attractive employers, avoiding negative end-customer impact from the increased attrition in the market?
Training in the modern workplace
Another issue on the table was, in a higher attrition environment, and with team members often working from home, what is best practise in training our people?
Mark Hayes, Head of Service Delivery at the FSCS, shared some tangible and helpful experience on this, evidencing the value of smaller groups when delivering complex training remotely. You might think that when delivering classroom training without the constraint of physical space, you can manage a larger group – but on a remote basis, it can be harder to maintain focus and concentration, so a smaller and more interactive group can be a better investment.
Establishing hybrid working policy
Choosing a path through the historically transforming landscape of hybrid working – should you and can you have a clear company policy, or do we still need to watch and learn?
Some members of the Industry Council could report really good experiences from quickly giving their teams clarity, whereas others had experienced unwanted attrition and had preferred to retract their policies.
At Capita, we tend to flex our model to our client needs and, personally, I think we need to keep a firm eye on the customer interest and ensure that above all business needs are being met – down whichever path that takes us. That said, business needs are often best met if we can also create a situation where our people’s needs are also being accounted for.
This is an interesting challenge for all leaders in the current environment and one we will still need to work through together for some time.
Embracing a total customer and colleague experience
The above challenges are becoming increasingly important to address, and the need to balance customer experience and colleague experience leads us to the concept of 'total experience’ as an organisational priority. The success of any organisation is built upon its people. Organisations that focus on proactive wellbeing will be more open to change and become more productive through having a healthier and engaged workforce.
In challenging the way in which employee wellbeing has traditionally focused solely on interventions aimed at the individual, a holistic approach recognises the importance of the organisational culture and associated business enablers, and provides the data and tools for organisations to assess and transform the environment in which their people operate. These organisational factors form the critical foundations for any impactful well-being and total experience strategy.
I’m looking forward to attending the next CCA event and getting the chance to share more experiences about creating better outcomes through excellence in customer experience. And I would love to hear your own thoughts and challenges on creating a total experience in your organisation.
Find out how we can help you with customer experience services and CX transformation:
Anna Koritz
Senior Client Partner, Financial Services, Capita Experience
Anna Koritz is the Senior Client Partner for Banking Clients, a part of our financial services market vertical that focuses on driving better outcomes for our clients. Anna has extensive experience of working with Tier 1 Banks, as a management consultant, as a corporate banker and as a banking client managing and transforming large scale payment operations and treasury services. Anna is passionate about effective deployment of best practise solutions and has an unrelenting customer outcome focus.
