If EX-CX Linkage And Integration Is Now A Priority For McDonald’s…..Isn’t That Directional For Your Company?

In a recent LinkedIn post, Tiffanie Boyd, Global Chief People Officer at McDonald’s stated: “At McDonald’s, we’ve built our people strategy on a simple but powerful idea: The employee experience fuels the customer experience.”

I wholeheartedly agree that this connection is both straightforward and powerful, have been saying so for years, and have generated volumes of proof to support the business outcome and enterprise cultural value of customer experience – employee experience linkage and integration.  One of my books, Employee Ambassadorship, was entirely devoted to this essential, value-add, stakeholder-centric, and strategic concept.

As an initial example of the direct and powerful business benefit of having employee experience connect to, and leverage, customer experience, Salesforce, for instance, has determined that companies which prioritize employee experience to deliver a premium customer experience achieve 1.8 times faster revenue growth.  That will get the attention of any CEO, COO, CMO, CCO, CFO, or CHRO.

Companies that are EX-CX linkage and integration exemplars understand that business excellence begins with a “people first” culture and a committed, contributory, and stable workforce.  Importantly, they also recognize, as Tony Hsieh, the late Zappos CEO, has stated, that brand strength is a lagging indicator of enterprise culture. Organizations that are in this rarified group, and the resulting low levels of annual employee turnover they have been able to attain, include – 

– Trader Joe’s – Under 10% churn
– Baptist Health Care – 14% churn
– Umpqua Bank – 8% churn
– Zappos – 12% churn
– Virgin Group – 8.5% churn
– Netflix – 11% churn
– Southwest Airlines – 4% churn
– Wegmans – 8% churn
– Costco – 17% churn under 1 year/6% over one year

One company not on this list is MBNA America, the major U.S. credit card issuer (acquired by Bank of America in 2006), whose cultural mantra for employees to deliver value was “Think of yourself as the customer”.  People-centric and operationally driven, the organization had extremely high cardholder and employee loyalty. Wegmans, often acknowledged as the best supermarket chain in America, proudly states “Employees First.  Customers Second.”, and the company has a set of humanistic core values on behalf of employees.  The company gets “great employees who want to stick around”.

These organizations have succeeded in creating optimum cultures of employee commitment, where EX-CX linkage and integration is fully evident in the company DNA.  Commitment, in this context, has three components of employee behavior:  a) active commitment to the company and its values, b) active commitment to the company’s product/service value proposition, and c) active commitment to the company’s customers and to fellow employees. 
 
One of the most complete and instructive quotes on the enterprise-wide value of linkage and integration comes from Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group of companies, who has  stated:

“….if the person who works at your company is 100% proud of the job they’re doing, if you give them the tools to do a good job, they’re proud of the brand.  If they were looked after, if they’re treated well, therefore the customer will have a nice experience.  If the person who’s working for your company is not given the right tools, is not looked after, is not appreciated, often the customer won’t want to come back for more.  So, my philosophy has always been that if you can put your staff first, your customer second, and shareholders third, effectively, in the end the shareholders do well, the customers do better and you yourself are happy.”

There are some seminal books on the intersection of customer and employee experience, including Firms of Endearment, Conscious Capitalism, Everybody Matters, Let My People Go Surfing, Outside In, Linchpins, Fanocracy, and The Experience Mindset. In my view, perhaps the most insightful book on the subject is The Customer Comes Second, by Hal Rosenbluth and Diane Peters, in which the authors state the case for making linkage and integration an enterprise priority:

“Companies are only fooling themselves when they believe that ‘The Customer Comes First’.  People do not inherently put the customer first, and they certainly don’t do it because their employer expects it.  We’re not saying choose your people over your customers.  We’re saying focus on your people because of your customers.  That way everybody wins.”

Extensive research, consulting and training has defined a fairly clear path to enterprise linkage and integration excellence.  Its early stage is Employee Satisfaction and Engagement, where organizations begin to manage and democratize employee programs which have greater focus on customer value delivery.  More progressive companies move to Employee Commitment, where there is greater emphasis on leadership and action/communication planning to help drive ROI (employee retention/churn reduction and deeper linkage between people, operational, and financial metrics).  The terminus, and ultimate goal, of this path is Employee Advocacy (previously identified as Ambassadorship), where the employee voice is essential and integral to all business operations and improvement initiatives.

So, if an organization like McDonald’s can, on a corporate level, commit itself to build customer value through employees, can’t yours?