Podcast: How to connect the employee and customer experience

Jonathan Davies

26 mins read

Table of Contents

Long time no see! We’ve been impatient to be back with another episode, so here we go.

Today we’re opening a discussion about employee and customer experience and the convergence of the two. We’re joined by the powerful duo of Ampa's Chief Marketing and People Officer Ben Buckton and your very favorite Jason Anthoine, who doesn't even need an introduction at this point.

Both of them have a lot to say on the topic, so without any further delay, let’s dive in!

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Jonathan Davies: Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Internal Communications podcast. It's been a little while since we were there, but that's what holiday periods will do to you. We have very, very great guests lined up who have all been very busy and on the well-deserved break.

So, that's what happens. Today I have a special treat and I know that this is like my key phrase and I always say this, but it's true. We've got two very, very high level guests in the form of Ben Buckton and our recurring guests - probably one of our biggest fan favorites - Jason Anthoine.

Now, what we will be talking about today is the convergence between the employee experience and the customer experience. How do companies make their brand live among the people that actually buy and consume the products, but also among people that work for the company.

Who are Chief Experience Officers?

Jason Anthoine: Well, first of all, I'm so glad to know that anyone reads anything that I post on LinkedIn.

The whole reason I posted that is I've been following the news and I get different emails, HR journals and people who've leaped into new roles, and things like that. And I've noticed a trend, for people moving into what they're calling ‘Chief Experience Officer’ role and usually, those are primarily people who are responsible for the customer experience. And because this is all I do all day long, I immediately thought, “What about the employee experience?” It got me to wondering, are there people out there who have that title of Chief Experience Officer who are responsible for both the customer experience and the employee experience.

The convergence between employee experience and customer experience

Ben Buckton: I wish it was as simple and clean cut as that, but as everything is going to have squiggles along the way to get to the outcome.

I believe that Ben and Jason will greatly be able to inspire you when it comes to forming your strategy and maybe even your overall comms set up for next year.

Brand equals experience

Jonathan Davies: Ben, is that then also the case how your job title came to be in the company that you're in now? Is that literally because the company that you worked for said, “Listen, we know that our brand is something that's alive and it's carried by our people and it's carried by fans or consumers, or companies within the market”. What was their decision there?

Ben Buckton: The reason for that gap is because people don't connect the experience between the two. We saw it as an organization. I joined the firm two years ago as we kicked off the strategic review and one of the things that we were looking at was how to drive the business forward. How do we drive into growth? How do we improve the client experience to support that growth? Everything that we were coming to was “Yes, this is great. This is all doable.” but actually if we don't have the right culture, we don't have the right framework to build from.

If you create the right culture, if you create that environment inside the organization, that culture is your brand. That is every part of your organization.

Where Internal Comms, HR, Marketing, Sales and IT are brought into play

Jason Anthoine: To me, that's an opportunity for Internal Comms to step up to own the relational piece of that, so HR owns the transactions and Internal Comms owns the relational side of that in the same way that Marketing and Sales own the customer experience.

It really takes that strong partnership between Internal Comms and HR, and also to a certain degree IT because, they own all the systems inside the org to be able to drive that employee experience.

Ben Buckton: What are the things that we either get asked about or talk about quite frequently? Are things like, “What did you do to your people during the pandemic?” Because some businesses didn't do great things. And actually that's a great representation of that brand in that culture to understand who they are and clients care about that.

Implementing Change

Jason Anthoine: I can guarantee you if you're doing any kind of survey at your organization, whether it's an annual or biannual engagement survey, or you're doing pulse surveys, it's been my experience that whenever you're asking your employees anything, and there's like, can you tell us anything else you want to know? In those open-ended content comment areas is where all the gold is.

You might think, “Oh, we got to get a thousand of these things done.” Pick one, pick one where you think you can have a big impact initially. For example, the recruiting process.