Nucleus Office Talks: Blending employee experience with customer experience

There was a time when technology drove the world; today it is the people. The companies are becoming increasingly aware how a positive customer experience can influence their businesses. Now, if you blend it with a good employee experience, you have a win-win situation.

When we think about "experience" in a commercial setting, more often than not we end up with customer experience — yet without the right talent, the customer experience (CX) is missing a critical piece of the jigsaw. So, how are marketing executives rethinking employee experience (EX) to close the loop and provide richer experiences for all?

At Nucleus Office Talks by Mastermind 2022 – Decoding the Value of Experience, we explored the theme with Mr. Biren Ghose, Country Head, Technicolour. One of the eminent names in the media and entertainment space, Mr. Ghose is a believer in creating quality experiences. A marketing and business strategist with extensive industry expertise, Ghose insists a brand needs to create a good employee experience to have a happy customer base. “For us at Techincolour, creating the customer experience comes from the fact that we want to create places to work that are the crossroad between technology and creativity," Ghose says.

“So a customer experience can only happen, provided you have an outstanding employee experience. And for us if you look at the whole ecosystem, employees' experience should not be reduced to engagement activities, and things which people do - like we will have a party or we will give an award. It is beyond that."

Ghose goes a step ahead in adding Partner Experience to the combination of Customer and Employee Experience for a more holistic and rewarding set-up. “I call this PX,” Ghose smiles and continues, "So the partner ecosystem creates tools and technology and the way that all this comes to bear on the combination of customer experience, employee experience and partner experience - it all comes together in some kind of magical way. “So I believe that the quality of this experience is that it creates trust; it creates people to be loyal to what they do because they are working in a place where they are treated differently."

Companies are paying more attention to the facilities which the new generation is on the lookout for while choosing a place of work. “The young folks are looking for a workplace which fits in with their lifestyle. They want to go to a place where they can choose their environment - they want to sit in the coffee area, they want to sit in the collab spaces, they want to sit in a team huddle; all of this is really important to them,” he says.

The revolution in technology has lent more power to the consumers which in turn influences the employee experience. Ghose, though, prefers to adopt a pragmatic approach when it comes to technology. He, rather, is a believer in “power of ideas.”

“I will tell you a secret. Technology never invented anything. Anything that was ever invented was invented by the power of ideas. Technology only enabled it, or helped it to scale up or go in a different direction,” Ghose says. “For instance, we are today living in a world where screens are advancing. Think of your last 5 television sets or your last 5 mobile phones. The screen revolution is the one which drives how new content is created. And the content today is about experiences. We basically help to pioneer that space."

Ghose advocates that future learning practices should be derived from the learnings of the past. “Let me tell you when my family and I want to go for a holiday, how do we choose where we want to go? We all have our bucket list, but we figure out how to come to this common denominator that will give us the collective experience that we seek and the return on that experience by making that trip together." “Similarly, the success of a studio, a creative technology studio like ours, relies on the collective energies and motivation of our teams, and the way they bounce off each other," he adds.

Leadership experience is proven to have a tremendous impact on the customer and employee experience. Today a sound leadership strategy is core to the growth of any business venture. Ghose acknowledges the role of leaders in the post-COVID world, pegged back by recession, and in simplifying the process. “You know what leaders are? Leaders are simplifiers. They can create the hack. They can make sure that because of the recessionary market these are the actions we will take,” Ghose says.

Understanding and trust thus become key areas for the leaders to work upon as they take on the challenges in the fast shifting market space. “A large number of people, and we don’t know the number, have come through the COVID period. So effectively the new experiences need to provide that layer of understanding, that layer of trust. So you are solving the business problem, but you are also making sure that the experiences of the employees can navigate all of that stuff,” Ghose says.

“So you need to make sure as a leader that you are cutting the coat according to the cloth. Not just from the point of view of financial resources, but very much from the point of view of the emotional quotient of the team that you have.”

There are plenty of studies which, too, confirm that employees’ happiness directly impacts their efficiency and productivity, leading to a satisfying customer experience. And word of mouth has never gained more prominence than in this digital world driven by social media! It, thus, becomes imperative, that to bolster profits, companies invest equally in customer and employee experience.

Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of Nucleus Office Parks by HT Brand Studio.