If you’ve followed our research, then you know that we’ve always viewed employee engagement as a fundamental component of customer experience.  One of our Six Laws of Customer Experience is that “Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers.” It just makes sense. How can you possibly expect to consistently deliver great customer experience with apathetic or disengaged employees?!?!

Although the connection between customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) may seem obvious to many people, it’s important that we periodically test the linkage. So we took a look at the data from our survey that drove the report, State of CX Management, 2018.

We started by splitting the 194 respondents from companies that have 1,000 or more employees into three groups based on how they rated the customer experience that their organizations currently delivers compared with their competitors:

• 51 companies that deliver considerably above average CX (“CX Leaders“)
• 61 companies that deliver slightly above average CX (“CX Moderates“)
• 82 companies that deliver average or below average CX (“CX Laggards“)

We compared their responses to Temkin Group’s 20-question CX Competency & Maturity Assessment. As you can see in the chart below:

• The percentage of CX Leaders who earned “good” or “very good” employee engagement ratings is more than 5-times larger than the percentage of CX Laggards.

• Most organizations have a long way to go on EX; less than 40% of CX Leaders are good at it–and they’re the best!

• CX Leaders significantly outperformed CX Laggards across all five employee engagement behaviors in our assessment. Here are the gaps in the percentages of companies that either “always” or “almost always” demonstrate these behaviors:
  • My company celebrates and rewards the employees who exemplify its core values (32 %-point gap)
  • My company actively solicits and acts upon employee feedback (35 %-point gap)
  • Managers are evaluated based on the engagement level of their employees (38 %-point gap)
  • The human resources organization is actively involved in strategic initiatives (36 %-point gap)
  • My company provides employees with industry-leading training (31 %-point gap)