3.062018

Fuse Customer Experience and Employee Experience to Drive Your Growth

If you want to know which comes first,  employees or customers, Donna Morris will answer “both.”  As the EVP of Customer and Employee Experience at Adobe Systems, Morris spearheads efforts to attract, engage, and develop employees and customers.  Moreover, these efforts are well-integrated and aligned.  In a recent interview, Morris outlined for me some of the primary ways she fuses together customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) and provided advice for other organizations that want to combine CX + EX efforts.

CX + EX — Why

When Adobe launched its enterprise business and started to directly engage with customers several years ago, Morris and other leaders recognized that they needed to develop a stronger customer support function within the organization.  They also understood that had to evolve their brand identity: Adobe needed to be known not just for its excellent products and how they enable creativity, but also for providing excellent customer experiences. When they asked themselves what was the biggest thing that would drive the way they needed to evolve, Morris said, they knew it was their culture.

They recognized that the excellence the organization had achieved with employees — the ability to fill key roles with top talent, the retention of talent, and people’s successful growth and development — could and should extend to customer relationships.  “We had become acutely aware of the parallels between how you build a great experience for customers and for employees,” Morris explained, “and we want to be as exceptional to work with as we are to work for.”  So they created a new department — a combined customer and employee experience organization — which brought together the support people on the front lines of helping customers with the human resources team responsible for supporting employees.

Morris believes that any business that is highly dependent upon employees to drive successful outcomes for the company or where employees operate in close proximity to customers should consider combining CX and EX into a single department.   The same three core elements drive  relationships with both — attraction, retention, and development — and the same success criteria apply to both.   With a combined CX and EX function, you can create an organization like Adobe that is focused on world class customer and employee experiences.

CX + EX — What

The fusion of CX and EX enabled Adobe to change its culture to be more driven around the success of their customers.  In her new role, Morris led the organization to implement several mechanisms to influence a stronger customer orientation among employees.

She knew that if she and her colleagues wanted employees to deliver great CXs, employees needed to know what was expected of them and there had to be “an element of risk” to it.  So Adobe implemented a compensation program that ties every employee to the customer.  It’s a short-term cash incentive plan that reflects company revenue performance and customer success measures such as retention and customer ratings such as “easy to business with.”  The program not only makes more tangible the contribution to customer experience that every employee makes, but also produces group alignment and synergy because everyone is working toward the same goals, Morris reported.

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