Jason S. Bradshaw argues that investing in customer and employee experience directly drives business growth. He cites research showing CX increases leads and loyalty while EX reduces turnover and boosts productivity and profits.
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to another live edition of Talking Points with me, your host, Jason S. Bradshaw. It's so great that you're taking time out of your busy schedule to catch up on today's thoughts. Now, today's topic is all about customer and employee experience and how it fuels business growth. It's actually something I get challenged on more than you might think. See, a lot of time I get challenged that customer experience or employee experience is just about giving everyone a great big hug or giving stuff away for free. But I don't believe that's the case. In fact, I believe that customer and employee experience is one of the best commercial investments that business can make. And I believe this because I've done the work to prove it. And I'm not the only one that has done research into this. So let's look at customer experience first. According to Bain and Company, their research has found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by between 25 and 95%. Now, if we work together, I can help you understand how those numbers come about. But the important thing is that with customer experience, it's not about going from zero to hero. It's about incremental improvements. And just a 5% increase in customer loyalty can deliver. Even just a 25% increase in profit should be a reason to be investing in it. Now, Nielsen, on the other hand, say 92% of consumers trust recommendations from who but their friends and family over all other forms of advertising. And how do you get that recommendation? Well, you get it by delivering a consistently positive customer experience. And thirdly, Qualtrics did some research a couple of years ago that showed that 30% of customers are willing to stop doing business with you after just one bad experience. Can you afford to lose 30% of your customers? So this is all well and good and big studies can show all sorts of things. But from my own personal experience, leading organizations, let me share one example. Now, there was one organization where I was the chief customer officer and I was leading the CX program. And the Consumer Insight showed that during the customer buying journey, there was one particular pain point. And that pain point was right near the beginning of the journey. So the customer hadn't even stepped into a retail location, and the brand was already delivering pain and friction to their experience. So what we did was we took that insight, reworked the customer journey so that we could add value where we usually provide pain, and that increased leads by over 200%. Now, even if your closing rate doesn't change, the fact that you're speaking to double the number of people has a significant impact on your bottom line. I could share you hundreds of examples, some small and some as big as that, and even bigger, where customer experience paying attention to sometimes the smallest detail can make the biggest difference to the likelihood your customer is going to buy from you or recommend you or come back and buy from you again. So that's customer experience and hopefully there's enough data points there and real life experience for you to understand that it really does lead to business growth. Now, employee experience, let's turn our minds to that for a moment. I'm going to give you three stats here as well. I might even give you a bonus one. And we'll start with a report by Glassdoor. Now, Glassdoor has found that employees with a strong employee brand, which is a result of consistently good employee experiences, see 28% reduction in turnover. Now, turnover impacts productivity, turnover impacts operating costs. So a 28% reduction is a really important achievement there. All by focusing on the experiences delivered by your leaders to your people. Now, according to Gallup, companies with a high employee engagement, and of course employee engagement is a byproduct of continuously delivering great employee experiences, now they can experience more productivity, more efficiency, and, and in their research they found that it can lead to a 21% improve or 21% greater profits. Now this research I always get challenged on, this research is also actually backed up by McKinsey and they found that productivity can be 25% higher than their competitive set in organizations that deliver great employee experiences. So it goes without saying that an increase in productivity leads to increases in productivity into product profitability. Increases in productivity lead to increases in profitability. And then the third stat comes from the World Economic Forum and they found that for every dollar that you invested in employee wellbeing, and of course employee wellbeing is a excellent part of a holistic employee experience program. They found that for every dollar you invested, Your company received $2.30 in return in terms of improved productivity. And I could go on. There's hundreds of research papers that prove that employee experience is a fundamental driver of customer experience and profitability. Now, talking from my own experience, I'll take an example of an organization where I was leading the, what I call the external employee experience. Now in this organization, its brand was represented by distributed network of business partners and their employees were effectively an extension of the brand. So we reworked the employee training program, the external employee training program, reward and recognition, more on the recognition side than the reward because they weren't directly our employees and ultimately focused on their job readiness as as they started their journey, representing the brand. Now, that work led to a 30% reduction in turnover. Now that has significant impact on customers and profitability. But it also ultimately has an impact in the long term on repeat and referral business. Because people like doing business with who they know, like and trust. And your employees are the people that they create, the customers create that emotional connection with. So again, there's astounding amount of information and experiences that prove that employee experience drives an improvement in your business from a commercial point of view. Now, the other question I get asked a lot is, okay, I don't have the time to invest in customer experience and employee experience. Which one should I look at first? And I always recommend that you start with the employee experience because when you get the employee experience right, the customer's experience improves as well. Now, it doesn't necessarily fix everything from a customer point of view, but it does start improving as a byproduct of the employee connectedness with the vision and mission of the company. The higher productivity, the increased engagement. So if you, for whatever reason, can only pay attention to one or the other at the moment, start with employee experience. However, there are ways that you can start improving the customer experience without investing lots of time or resources as well. So I'd love to help you and your business breakthrough in 2024 achieve the success that you've been looking for. I do have spaces open in my 12 week accelerator course, my growth accelerator course. This is a bespoke coaching program which takes elements from a whole range of programs that I have available designed to focus on those areas that are the greatest opportunities for you. But of course, we do it through a lens of a customer and employee experience so that they're sustain improvements in your business and that you'll continue to grow. So go to businessbreakthroughcoaching.net you'll learn more about the program, you'll be able to apply for the program, and if we're a great fit, we'll set up your onboarding call. But right now, remember that those that succeed take action. So get over to businessbreakthroughcoaching.net and check out the program and apply today. So until next time we speak, I wish you great success.
