The CX-EX Connection

Government agencies know customer experience (CX) is central to their missions, and they invest energy, time and money to understand and improve it.

Executive Order 14058 made CX a top federal priority and linked it to rebuilding trust in government, while at the state and local levels, organizations have long focused on constituent services as their bread and butter.

One of the most important facets of CX isn’t customer-facing, though — it’s employee experience (EX). Giving employees the tools and environment they need to do their jobs has a profound impact on how well they can serve the public.

“While customers have increasingly enjoyed well-designed self-service portals and mobile apps, with rich and up-to-date information at their fingertips, all too often staff have been left struggling with clunky and disjointed systems accessed via slow corporate networks and out-of-date desktop infrastructure,” said Dave Vile, CEO and Distinguished Analyst at Freeform Dynamics, in Computer Weekly.

Every organization has internal systems or processes that frustrate employees. And internal problems often reverberate as subpar customer experiences. In a Harvard Business Review article, business leadership expert Denise Lee Yohn observed, “A company cannot expect to deliver a tech-enabled, seamless, and intuitive CX … if everything it does with employees is on paper, slow, and bureaucratic.”

Identify Opportunities to Improve

You may have a good idea of which processes cause problems for customers, but before you launch a large-scale automation or workflow transformation, do some internal research.

Employees are the experts on their own jobs, and they rate their job satisfaction higher when they’re involved in decisions that affect their work.

Small tweaks can result in outsized improvements, and you don’t necessarily have to build your solutions from scratch. Existing tools might do the trick, but you need input from the employees who use them to see if an upgrade is needed.

Map It

To make effective changes, you’ll need to know how the process works now — both on the customer side and internally.

Interview users of the service to learn what issues they have. Use journey maps or service blueprints that track both CX and EX to identify areas of friction and opportunities for improvement.

“By looking closely at how your staff go about doing their jobs, you may find that there are real avenues for delivering better and more human-centered services to the public by improving the tools that employees use internally,” GovLoop Featured Contributor Greg Jordan-Detamore, Associate Director for Human-Centered Government at Code for America (CfA), wrote in a recent post.

This article appeared in our guide, “Tools and Tactics for Employee Engagement.” For more insights on bringing out the best in your employees, download the guide:

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