Look Within to Manage Experience

Creating a positive environment for employees is now a must-have item, even for businesses that focus on experience management.

I have been promoting and advocating the benefits of experience management for years now, but the truth is many organizations have not yet even dipped a toe in the water of EM. These organizations are placing experience on a “nice to have” list or not even factoring it as a core business need.

However, in an age of hybrid working, when employees can make snap decisions about where and how they work and share their experience via social media, you simply can’t leave experience to chance! Ensuring a good experience may be the difference between thriving or failing.

In the world of Managed Service Providers (MSP), it’s easy sometimes to be completely outward looking. However, it is difficult to argue that experience is a must have if you are not using it everywhere you can. Any MSP promoting or going to market with an experience management offering is not worth much if they themselves are not using it within their own organization. As a leader, I value the experience of my team above anything else, and this is why we have invested the time and money in the same Experience Management we sell externally to our internal business.

There are a multitude of methods that all overlap to allow us to draw a picture of what the experience is like in the business. On top of this, at my organization we apply a persona-based diversification element, as one size does not fit all.

Of these multiple methods, I am going to focus on one method that proved very effective for us. This method is partly very traditional and partly very cutting edge, bringing the two elements together to paint a thorough picture to allow us as leaders to confidently gauge the experience of our associates.

Starting with the traditional, we have embraced the power of surveys - short, pinpointed questions to our team. The questions are customized to reflect specific activities/scenarios they have just performed. Timing is always critical with surveys. You need to capture the information when the experience is fresh in the mind of your audience. There is no point in expecting accurate insights for something that happened long in the past.

Combined with this, we are using our Device Experience Management (DEX) tooling to capture the true sentiment of interactions and of our team members. Overlaying the sentiment data with our survey data shows us clearly how good the experience is. We then follow up with team members who are potentially having a negative experience. We can start to build a plan based on tangible actions of change.

Finally, actually embracing these changes and actioning them is key! This is where you can make an active difference when it comes to the experience of your team. Continually doing this gives you a service and working environment that is evolving and improving!

If you’re not looking at experience within your organization, then you need to start now. Thriving businesses are ones that really embrace experience, measure it, manage it, and improve it. You do not need to go big to start with; the beauty of experience management is that you can start to make improvements with only a few data points, as long as those data points are focusing and measuring on what really matters.