In today's highly engaged digital age, the worst kept secret to success is a customer-centric design approach. Designing personal and engaging customer experiences has become table stakes when talking about digital experiences. However, there is a piece to human-centered design that many companies are still missing that is critical to business transformation: employee experience.
 
As our CEO Eric Berridge writes in his book Customer Obsessed, "People not technology, are the driving force behind a company's success." At Bluewolf, we believe employee engagement is the leading indicator of a customer's experience. If your employees aren't engaged, then you can bet your customers aren't either. That's why it's equally, if not more important, to recognize how employee engagement maps to customer experience. Understanding how these experiences align and where the issues and opportunities intersect is the first step in driving true business transformation.
  
Start with Business Outcomes
Before you dive into customer experience, define what success looks like for your organization. Are you a disrupter? Is your brand more established? Companies at each stage have different outcomes or goals, and measure success differently. Starting the conversation with the desired business outcomes guides the development of customer and employee experience strategies that will help achieve them and make your business more successful. 

Understand Emotions
As humans, we are far less rational than we give ourselves credit for. According to Harvard Business Review, 95% of our decision making actually happens in our subconscious. That's why it's so important to empathize with your customers and employees by understanding the emotions driving their behavior.

Rather than relying on what you think you know about your customer's journey, map each step through firsthand interviews with your customers and employees. Gaining an understanding of the specific pain points (on both sides) that make or break your customer's brand experience will ensure you are not only listening but your responses are empathetic.
 
Engage Your Employees 
Building empathy for your customers provides the critical insights needed to design better solutions that meaningfully address their needs and desires. You need to engage your employees in the same way.
 
Once you have mapped the customer journey, track the corresponding employee journey supporting every touch point. What are the internal processes that support your customers' actions? Which teams are accountable? Can they collaborate effectively? Before you can create a long-term solution to a customer problem, you need to understand the underlying process and solve employee pain points that are preventing them from delivering an exceptional customer experience. 

They say that a customer's last best experience anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for experiences everywhere. What many don't realize is that this same idea holds for employees as well and many will switch jobs as easily as they change their brand preferences. It all circles back to empathy--how can you help make your employees' jobs better so they can focus on customers? Start with an employee and customer experience map and design your initiatives and programs around it. Process that supports people will always deliver better experiences than people supporting processes. 

Register for our upcoming webcast "How to Bring Customer Obsession to Life in 2017" to learn more about how you can use customer and employee experience mapping to transform your business.