Why CIOs should prioritise the customer experience

You’d be hard-pressed to find a CIO who wouldn’t agree that improv­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (CX) is inte­gral to their role. From cre­at­ing AI-dri­ven vir­tu­al assis­tants that aug­ment cus­tomer-care teams to replac­ing lega­cy tech when it’s no longer serv­ing the needs of users, CIOs work hard to ensure that omnichan­nel plat­forms work smooth­ly for con­sumers. But what about the employ­ee expe­ri­ence (EX)?

Accord­ing to pre-pan­dem­ic research by Sales­force, a sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of CIOs didn’t have EX on their to-do lists. Only 52% of IT lead­ers said that they pri­ori­tised it, while only 22% had a defined EX strat­e­gy. Those per­cent­ages are like­ly to have risen dur­ing the Covid cri­sis, but it is clear that, while vir­tu­al­ly all CIOs recog­nise the sig­nif­i­cant impact that tech­nol­o­gy has on cus­tomer engage­ment, far few­er have joined the dots when it comes to its effects on employ­ees. 

That’s an over­sight, accord­ing to Colleen Berube, CIO at Zen­desk. “There is a direct line between hap­py, engaged employ­ees and sat­is­fied cus­tomers,” she says. 

For instance, a study by For­rester and SAP Con­cur (also before the pan­dem­ic) revealed that com­pa­nies with the most engaged employ­ees enjoyed 81% high­er cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion than aver­age and expe­ri­enced half the employ­ee turnover, which adds up to a sig­nif­i­cant com­pet­i­tive edge. 

“In the Covid era, there’s anoth­er impor­tant rea­son to focus on EX,” Berube says. “Busi­ness­es are oper­at­ing in an incred­i­bly high-demand labour mar­ket, so they need every advan­tage to attract and retain employ­ees in a sus­tain­able way.”

In both respects, CIOs can make a key con­tri­bu­tion, she adds. “They can have a mean­ing­ful impact, as tech­nol­o­gy fac­tors are strong pre­dic­tors of employ­ee engage­ment. The role of the IT pro­fes­sion­al is no longer sim­ply about run­ning the company’s tech­nol­o­gy. Now it’s about guid­ing and gov­ern­ing choic­es; defin­ing archi­tec­ture and solu­tions; and devel­op­ing the right ser­vices to con­nect employ­ees, so that they can bet­ter serve their cus­tomers. This is the true end goal.”

There are many ways in which CIOs can make a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence to EX. The whole­sale migra­tion to hybrid work­ing, for instance, has seen firms adopt­ing an abun­dance of tech­nolo­gies to sup­port remote work­ers. There has also been a wave of dig­i­tal well­be­ing plat­forms that claim to sup­port EX online while pro­vid­ing feed­back on people’s men­tal health to man­age­ment teams. And then there is the chang­ing role of HR, in which AI-pow­ered chat­bots help HR man­agers to han­dle basic requests from employ­ees. All of these tech­nolo­gies fall under the CIO’s remit. 

Per­haps the most over­looked way in which CIOs can bol­ster EX is to focus on the impres­sions cre­at­ed each time an employ­ee engages with an inter­nal sys­tem – a dig­i­tal trail some­times referred to as the DEX (dig­i­tal employ­ee expe­ri­ence). 

CIOs can dis­cern much about the mood of the work­force by analysing the DEX. They can learn of employ­ees’ frus­tra­tions with clunky tech and gauge their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by analysing people’s dig­i­tal out­put and the time they spend on dig­i­tal dis­trac­tions such as social media.   

“An employee’s dig­i­tal foot­print can give IT teams great insights into how to improve their EX strat­e­gy,” says Hele­na Nim­mo, CIO at Enda­va. “Map­ping employ­ee tech­nol­o­gy touch­points and jour­neys through­out the sys­tem, mea­sur­ing time spent on cer­tain tasks and local­is­ing jour­ney inter­rup­tions can help to improve employ­ees’ expe­ri­ences and alle­vi­ate their frus­tra­tions.” 

She con­tin­ues: “The key is to ensure that such data col­lec­tion doesn’t cross into sur­veil­lance ter­ri­to­ry and that it actu­al­ly ben­e­fits employ­ees. For this, the wider lead­er­ship team needs to be involved to under­stand what the com­pa­ny wants to achieve and how an improved EX strat­e­gy can help. Being trans­par­ent about data col­lec­tion, run­ning small­er tests and anonymis­ing data will be more ben­e­fi­cial than going big and col­lect­ing every­thing. This will cre­ate a more com­pelling EX strat­e­gy that will attract the right tal­ent and, ulti­mate­ly, improve staff sat­is­fac­tion and reten­tion.”

Measuring employee engagement

CIOs can even go fur­ther by imple­ment­ing tech­nolo­gies aimed at mea­sur­ing EX more effec­tive­ly and cre­at­ing new chan­nels through which to view dig­i­tal foot­prints. 

Robert Orde­v­er is man­ag­ing direc­tor of OC Tan­ner Europe, a spe­cial­ist provider of employ­ee recog­ni­tion pro­grammes. He cites the exam­ple of one com­pa­ny whose annu­al staff sur­vey found that female employ­ees felt less appre­ci­at­ed than their male coun­ter­parts. There was noth­ing the firm could see in its data that high­light­ed any vari­ance in how the con­tri­bu­tions of men and women were acknowl­edged. 

“Using advanced tech­nol­o­gy to analyse this data more close­ly, the organ­i­sa­tion found a dif­fer­ence in the words that employ­ees used to recog­nise each other’s per­for­mance,” he says. “It turned out that male employ­ees were receiv­ing recog­ni­tion with stronger pos­i­tive state­ments at a high­er mag­ni­tude than female employ­ees.” 

The firm then went one step fur­ther by blend­ing data from its staff sur­vey, recog­ni­tion pro­gramme and per­for­mance man­age­ment sys­tem. 

“The analy­sis revealed that female employ­ees received less than fair per­for­mance reviews and were more like­ly to feel dis­con­nect­ed from the organ­i­sa­tion,” Orde­v­er says. “This insight informed tar­get­ed train­ing for lead­ers that was cost-effec­tive, man­age­able and impact­ful in address­ing the root caus­es of dis­en­gage­ment and feel­ings of exclu­sion.”

The bot­tom line is that more CIOs must recog­nise the sig­nif­i­cant role that tech­nol­o­gy plays in employ­ee engage­ment and how it can be used to under­pin a win­ning EX strat­e­gy. 

Pierre Lind­mark is the founder and CEO of Win­ningtemp, which has cre­at­ed an AI-pow­ered EX plat­form that gives employ­ers a real-time view of how their peo­ple are far­ing. He observes that, as long as “dig­i­tal inno­va­tions con­tin­ue dis­rupt­ing busi­ness mod­els and cul­tures, CIOs need to work more close­ly with HR teams to ensure their suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion. CIOs who equip them­selves with peo­ple ana­lyt­ics or insights are in a unique posi­tion to dri­ve busi­ness trans­for­ma­tions, as they can show hard data to sup­port their EX strate­gies.”

It’s no longer a ques­tion of whether EX should be includ­ed on every CIO’s to-do list – it’s a ques­tion of why it isn’t near the top.