How can employee-facing technology improve your customer experience?

Transcript

Robert Zirk: Imagine you're a customer service agent, and a customer calls in with a product issue. After entering some basic information, you tab over to your CRM system to look up their profile and wait as the cursor... turns into an hourglass.

You apologize and let them know you're just waiting on systems to load. Thankfully, the system unfreezes, and with the customer's information confirmed, you can now address the issue. You search the knowledge base. Mm, that's not it. Let's try a different phrase. Nothing. You place the customer on hold. Your searches aren't coming up with anything the customer described and the pressure is on. Seconds feel like minutes. And, ready or not, you have to take the customer off hold... and they're not happy.

Annoyed customer (on the phone): What’s the hold up?

Robert Zirk: You continue to search, but to no avail. Finally, you give up and promise a call back within three business days.

The customer responds with a rude sign-off and hangs up.

And after you type out your call notes, it's onto more calls that go a lot like this one.

How would you feel about your work? And, moreover, how will that affect the customer experience?

In a survey from Eagle Hill Consulting, 22% of workers in the U.S. stated that the technology they use makes it more difficult to serve customers. And 35% report frustrations with the technology they use at work.

So today on Questions for now, we'll ask: How can employee-facing technology improve your customer experience?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS International where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

So how does technology contribute to an excellent employee experience?

I asked Hugo Sampaio, vice president of information technology services at TELUS International, and he noted that the employee experience begins as soon as you hire, and as the old adage goes, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.

Hugo Sampaio: A lot of team members start judging the experience with their company by how smooth the onboarding process is, right? So what does it look like they want? Did they get their computer turned on? Do they have access? And so on.

Although it may seem quite trivial, that is that first impression for the user. And it also allows them to be as productive as quickly as possible. And it removes, even for the leaders and the managers, escalations because their team members don't have the right level of access.

Robert Zirk: When you think about the parallels between the employee experience and the customer experience, it becomes clear how intertwined they are and how leaders need to treat both with a high level of importance and care. After all, to quote leadership expert Simon Sinek, customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.

Hugo Sampaio: There's a reason the company's made of team members. Those team members are the soul and the heart of the company. And we see that every day. Those team members that are happy, engaged, feel empowered, feel that they're trusted, they have the right tools in their hands, the processes are as streamlined for them as possible to enable them to do their jobs well, will also go the extra mile and feel committed to support the customers. The linkage between the two and developing tools, technology, rolling that out, change management that reinforces that strong engagement will lead to strong client outcomes as well.

Robert Zirk: Hugo notes that the attention you put on technology and how it affects the employee experience directly reflects on the kind of service you provide to your customers.

Hugo Sampaio: It's impossible to separate the two. And I think when we look at a lot of the changes, a lot of technology that we implemented is to recognize exactly that: the importance of an engaged workforce drives high client satisfaction in terms of how we provide services to those clients.

Robert Zirk: It's logical to think that happier and more engaged employees are more likely to deliver a better customer experience. But is that a theory or is there research to back that up?

To get the answer I asked Professor Thomas Hollmann. He's a member of the marketing faculty at Arizona State University, which recently announced a partnership with OpenAI to explore how AI can be used in work processes, the classroom, and in research. He's also the executive director of ASU's Center for Services Leadership, which connects companies and faculty to improve service organizations and service firms. Professor Hollmann explained that the link between employee experience and customer experience is grounded in research.

Thomas Hollmann: It's called the service profit chain. It's about 30 years old now and basically makes the argument that if you want, at the end, as an organization, you want profit, you want, all the wonderful revenue and other metrics you want to hit. If you want to get to that, you can only do that if you have satisfied customers. So that's the thing you need to work on, is not the profit that comes if you get the satisfied customers, but then the service profit chain says that only happens if you have satisfied and loyal employees.

So it really starts in that framework with understanding how the employees are satisfied in how they're loyal, how that then influences a good customer experience, which then influences customer satisfaction, which will create customer loyalty, which will create all the wonderful profit and revenue we're looking for.

Robert Zirk: This concept is at the heart of TELUS International's Culture Value Chain, a proven formula where a strong corporate culture and employee engagement lead to the ability to innovate, achieve higher customer satisfaction and ultimately deliver stronger financial performance.

Organizations that provide their employees with advanced digital tools are more likely to have strong employee engagement. In fact, in a Harvard Business Review survey of 492 executives, two-thirds of respondents who work for organizations that have substantially implemented high-quality digital tools report high levels of engagement, compared to only 41% of respondents who work for organizations with a limited amount of quality digital tools.

High-quality tools increase productivity, enhance collaboration and improve job satisfaction - factors that lead to a better experience for your customers. But when your team members don't have the right tools, or they don't have tools that work properly, it can have the inverse effect. For example, when agents have to juggle multiple systems and platforms with inefficient workflows, they're more likely to have higher average handle times and less call capacity, translating to longer wait times for customers. And if team members experience system failures or downtime, they aren't able to provide any service to customers. Apart from the negative reputation that can grow amongst customers, the cost of downtime for businesses averages almost $9,000 a minute, according to a Ponemon Institute study.

To avoid these costly consequences, employees need to be set up for success. And that means providing accessible, understandable and timely IT support. Hugo noted that your IT service desk should provide more than one way for team members to get the answers they're looking for, including self-service. But you'll want to make sure that you're still enabling them to reach human support when the issue is more involved.

Hugo Sampaio: So, for example, very basic password resetting and account unlocking. We supported, I think now, three or four different ways because before, users might engage with the system in a different way. They may be calling in from home, they may be in the office. They may have already booted their machine, they may need to reset their password on their phone. So, like I said, even for something like a password reset, we've taken a multitude of automation approaches because it is much faster still to reset a password through that automation that it is to call someone.

Robert Zirk: Working with one client, TELUS International discovered that three out of 10 tickets the client's IT service desk received were for password resets and account unlocks. This led to the implementation of a chatbot solution that's estimated to answer a thousand such requests for the client on a monthly basis.

Predictive analytics can also help triage IT issues by automatically sending incidents and requests to the appropriate teams.

Hugo Sampaio: Old ways of doing it, there'll be a tier one. They take a ticket in a bucket, they triage, they pass it maybe to a tier two team. What we're doing with predictive analytics is getting those tickets routed directly. So predictive analytics acts like you're tier one. And how does it do? It analyzes the content of the ticket. So the user doesn't have to say, "Oh, this is a password reset I need for this app." They'll write it almost in a natural language and then the system detects, "Okay, well, I think Hugo needs to reset a password for his access to ERP. I'm going to route that to the ERP team as opposed to having a tier one team having to do that manually."

Robert Zirk: Automation helps IT service desk agents focus on more complex issues, and by enabling self-service options, it helps to deflect tickets altogether.

Hugo Sampaio: We don't want to try to resolve an incident in five seconds, but then have the user call another five times 'cause the incident's not resolved. And then just continuous ongoing root cause analysis. What is it gonna take to do more incident deflection? We've seen, across the board, probably a reduction in the last six months of almost 50%, number of requests and incidents coming through and delays in terms of processing, just through some of these things and some of the tools that provide this level of automation to the service desk.

Robert Zirk: Hugo mentioned how automation has helped TELUS International streamline the onboard and offboarding process by ensuring new team members, based on their role, location and profile, have the right tools and levels of access they need to complete tasks.

Hugo Sampaio: For example, if I'm a developer, I'm gonna need access to certain tools versus someone who's part of, say, the marketing team. So the ability to automate that based on roles and roles, profiles and role-based access is key. It cuts a lot on creating tickets to ask user X to gain access to user Y. It helps from a security standpoint as well, because you can prove to auditors, when we're doing our annual audits, all these processes are being triggered through automation and the removal of access from a security perspective happens there as well.

Robert Zirk: Similar to how customer-facing chatbots can help customers find the information they need quickly and easily, internal agent-facing chatbots can help employees do the same using your knowledge base. Hugo highlighted the importance of collaboration with suppliers to understand AI product offerings and the best use cases for them.

Partnerships can be a valuable way to create more comprehensive and effective tools for your team members. As a long-standing partner with Google, TELUS International has leveraged Google products to build solutions for its business, including for internal purposes. One example is the large language model that powers Google's Gemini AI. It was deployed to create a secure and private internal generative AI powered search tool called Synapse.

Hugo Sampaio: So the idea is we can train it with our own content. It could be, like, right now, for example, we are loading org charts into it so that users don't have to log into our ERP platform to figure out who reports to who. But also we're using it to query some of our contract documents as a more powerful enterprise search engine. The IT team is using it for network and engineering troubleshooting because it could take a lot of the content that was created, train the large language model, make it available through a chatbot so they can query. What we've done, because we also use Google Workspace, is we've gone the path of Google 'cause it just makes it easier to integrate even what I just described here with Google Chat itself.

Robert Zirk: Along with providing employees with the tools to do their jobs effectively, technology can also be leveraged to facilitate greater communication and collaboration across an organization, which is key to fostering employee engagement.

Hugo Sampaio: One of the things that team members say is they wanna be able to feel informed, participate in communications, know what's going on in terms of training with the company. So we launched a communication platform that is deployed to all the regions in the world and is tailored to different countries and regions and languages as well.

We also moved away a lot from email communications. Email is very much a one-way, so when we share, whether it's new policies or new training or new events, we try to do it through this communication engagement platform 'cause it allows for commenting back and it can run surveys so we can survey our team members.

Robert Zirk: Communication and collaboration tools play an important role in employee engagement, but implementing technology just for the sake of technology, without a clearly defined strategy and goal, doesn't benefit anyone.

In a 2023 Harvard Business Review article, just 52% of executives stated their business used technology that works effectively for their employees. And a Qualtrics report highlighted that only 30% of employees feel that the technology their company provides them with exceeds their expectations.

When employees have access to the right tools that allow them to work effectively, it can have a big impact. The same Qualtrics report notes that, if employees have the technology that supports their work, they're 230% more engaged and 85% more likely to stay in their roles for longer than three years. Beyond the technology itself, Thomas notes that it's important to be strategic and collaborative in how you roll out employee-facing digital tools.

Thomas Hollmann: Always bring the employees on board. Have them participate in the change. Have it something that happens with them and not to them. So understanding how the employees can become part of the journey and rather than just, "Here's this thing, now do it," we have to really manage that as any other change process. For example, of course, you have to communicate and over communicate with employees around "What is the goal? Why are we doing this?" We have to create incentives that make employees interested in using it. We have to create stories. I like to approach the culture perspective from stories of employees using it in a good way and making those front and center. Calling them out, maybe at an employee meeting, and telling their view and how they experience this, giving them a idea of what is beneficial about this new technology to the customer as well as to them. There's a part to this story that's really about having a benefit to both sides. Working, small wins, recruit volunteers, have them build something, then communicate that out. All the standard change management principles apply here.

Robert Zirk: And to get buy-in and support from team members as you navigate a digital transformation, Hugo notes that it's important to keep your employees engaged in the implementation process.

Hugo Sampaio: It's how do we use technology to augment us human beings without overshadowing us as human beings is the key thing to making sure that we continue to get the buy-in and support from our team members for this type of transformation. And then, making the team members part of the decisions to some extent and where we invest in some of the tools. Strong change management, strong training as well. And recognizing that sometimes there might be failed attempts at deploying certain solutions and being able to re-vector and focus elsewhere.

Robert Zirk: Improving the employee experience, much like the customer experience, is an ongoing journey, and that involves ensuring you have open lines for feedback on what works well and what doesn't.

Hugo Sampaio: We tend to focus a lot on availability and uptime. Those are table stakes at the end of the day, from a user perspective. What the user also wants to be able to see is, is play with functionality that allows them to be quick, productive, engaged with that application. In order to do that, we need to be able to gather feedback from the users on how they're doing and playing with that product. In my team, when we launch something, we adopted something which is a slight variation of a customer satisfaction score, which is likelihood to recommend. And basically, if we develop a product or if we develop changes to a product in the team we work with, would they recommend this? Would they use us again? Would they wanna do the same things or would they go elsewhere? That's one of the metrics that we use to help understand have we been successful, at least at the engagement with our internal stakeholders and those that we support?

The other thing is we look at adoption. So the AI tools that we deployed, we feed a lot of metrics directly from the infrastructure that is running those tools into our business analytics tools to look at how many new users have onboarded and started using those tools. How many interactions per user are we getting a day? How many interactions do we get total in a month? And we use that to determine what other training do we need to run, what other change management activities do we need to run? And as an example, we run then focus group sessions where we meet with particular stakeholders with that data and say, "We noticed that usage for these tools is not where we expected it to be. What are some of the roadblocks?"

Robert Zirk: There is a clear parallel to how you might measure overall customer satisfaction. You want to ensure that customers are able to provide feedback using their preferred channels and the same goes for your employees. Thomas agrees that even though you may already have some statistics to work with, it's important to balance this with a qualitative approach, which can begin with consulting your team members.

Thomas Hollmann: Just ask them, sit down with them, take the time. And that is true not only for the person doing the research, but also for the senior leadership.

So to communicate in whatever form they communicate already. They might have a monthly town hall. They might have weekly emails they do. Communicate in that something about what you can learn or what you have learned from these qualitative efforts. So interviews, focus groups, then bring it right into your maybe weekly newsletter and say "I recently was able to listen to an employee talk about the new tool and they told me about such and such, and that really makes me feel good, but also bring it into a conversation as opposed to just measurement. It's really amazing how much that is appreciated by employees and how much they really listen and learn from those things.

Robert Zirk: Thomas notes that comparing how usage and adoption rates mesh with qualitative feedback can provide a provisional sense of how effective your employee-facing technology is in supporting the delivery of a great customer experience.

Thomas Hollmann: When you combine those two, you usually get a clearer picture of exactly that question. People might be using it for many minutes or hours, depending on the tool, per day, but it might be because they're struggling with it, right? So you're gonna look at one measure, which is how many employees and how many hours have they been using the tool? And you see, "Oh, this is growing, this is great!" Whereas the qualitative technique then tells you it's growing because people are really not sure how to use it and it's not working well. And so understanding or combining those two and then having a understanding that way of if it's not working at the rate or at a normal rate for change management purposes that you would want. So again, unfortunately there's no easy answers, no one measure I can give you where you have, "If this goes over 0.75, you intervene" or something. It's really that work of rolling up our sleeves and doing both the interviewing focus group as well as the more technical measurements.

Robert Zirk: So what do you do when your measurement efforts show that the deployment of new technology isn't going according to plan? Thomas says that the first thing to do is figure out to what extent things are off track, because there might still be an opportunity to correct course. He gave an example where a company might introduce a new CRM and have employees enter post-meeting reports into it.

Thomas Hollmann: So is this something that's a normal growing pain of us using this? What is the uptake on that? How many of our salespeople, how many do it? What percentage of time do they do it? All those wonderful things. It could be just that it's taking them a little longer than they would like, so it's taking them 10 minutes rather than five minutes like we thought and that's why the uptake isn't there. So maybe some training can help and help get them closer to five minutes. So that's one level of thing.

The other thing is at the other end, is where it's not gonna work at all. When do you pull that little rip cord and say, "This is not gonna work. We have to switch." And that's a continuum there where you, in each level of, let's say how bad it's working, in each level of "it's not working quite as well" to "this is a disaster," you're gonna have to have different responses.

Robert Zirk: A Gallup survey shows that business units and teams with high levels of employee engagement experience a 10% increase in customer loyalty and engagement, and a 23% increase in profitability. Companies whose team members are highly engaged end up with a 147% higher earnings per share than their competitors. And a Harvard Business Review report centered around technology and employee engagement showed that 82$ of employees say the technology they use at work directly impacts their happiness. Hugo shared how TELUS International's emphasis on employee engagement has led to stronger customer experience outcomes.

Hugo Sampaio: Now, engagement means more than happiness, but happy, I think, is an interesting word to describe. When you are engaged, you generally feel happy.

So we recognized very early on that high engagement would lead to lower attrition. High engagement would lead to higher productivity. That same high engagement also leads to a greater sense of innovation. And where that innovation comes from is because if you feel engaged, if you feel empowered, you probably feel like you can take greater calculated risks. You can try new things because you're gonna be encouraged to try new things. And risk taking, or calculated risk taking, is part of one of our values as well.

So where I'm going with all this is: these are all the ingredients that make for a great client satisfaction. I guarantee you, if someone comes to work that is not happy with their employer and their leader and their processes and the tools, it's probably not gonna be as keen to provide a good service to our customers. All of that is interconnected.

Robert Zirk: And Thomas reinforced the importance of employee experience as something brands need to keep in mind to achieve the best customer experience possible.

Thomas Hollmann: Without a good employee experience, you will not go to good customer experience, right? That's just all the research we've seen and done over many decades now. That's just a fact for you to start out from. So then, when you're trying to think about "How can I increase revenue and profit?" and then you go back, most companies have no problem stepping back one level and saying, "Oh, we need to make customers happy and satisfied and loyal. Okay," to then take that extra step one level more back and say, "That only happens if we have employees that are satisfied and loyal, and how do we do that?" Many of the things we've talked about with regards to bringing employees on board, making sure that they understand why the change is happening, how it helps them, how it helps the customer, creating stories that we can share both about employee experiences and customer experience that show employees that this is something that has a positive impact and that connects with the employees.

Robert Zirk: Thank you so much to Hugo Sampaio and Thomas Hollmann for joining me and sharing their insights today. And thank you for listening to Questions for now, a TELUS International podcast.

And if you want the very best LX, that's listener experience, be sure to follow Questions for now on your podcast player of choice and make sure you're getting notifications every time there's a new episode. I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all... for now.