When we speak about experiences, it is almost always unidimensional. We are super-focused on crafting customer experiences (CX) that are authentic and seamless and work to continuously enhance their experiences. But even when brands go out of their way to drive CX, many do not see this translate into accelerated business value.
Why? Because they ignore employee and partner experiences.
How are partner and employee experiences related to customer experiences? Where does digital enablement figure in this 3-tiered experience module?
3-Tiered Experience Module
The business value chain starts with the employees, followed by partners and then come the customers. However, the focus has been only on the last part of the value chain. Seamless, authentic and personalized experiences are necessary across all touchpoints in the value chain, starting from employees to partners to customers.
EX = CX
A steady job with a good pay package does not suffice for today’s workforce. They seek flexi-work options, work-life balance, more challenging opportunities where they can make use of their critical and creative faculties, an enabling environment, inclusive work culture, space for innovation, freedom from busywork, their voice to be heard, coaching and mentoring, learning opportunities, on-demand and instant support on the job and so on. All this impacts employee experiences (EX).
Disengaged/ disgruntled employees cannot deliver on the promise of personalized, seamless experiences to customers. Despite best efforts from the brand, customers know when employees are dissatisfied with their work. Thus, CX will be broken and incohesive with lower CSAT scores and brand loyalty.
For instance, if sales executives spend nearly 70% of their work hours on filling out paperwork, answering repetitive questions and going back and forth before sending out quotes, they will have little energy to spend on effectively engaging leads and converting them.
CX and PX
Partners are a critical part of business be it dealers, resellers, original equipment manufacturers, system integrators, distributors or others. You could be a paint company selling through retail dealers, a high-end car company selling through fancy dealerships, a software company that depends on resellers, a heavy-equipment manufacturer that depends on your distributors or an e-grocery chain that depends on a logistic partner network.
What your channel partners do directly affects your customers and CX. So, enterprises expect channel partners to be shared agents in delivering seamless and authentic customer experiences. But when partners are dissatisfied with the enterprise, it has a direct impact on CX.
For instance, when the process of placing orders for products involves too much paperwork/ unnecessary delays, the partner experience (PX) suffers. Customers may have to wait around for order fulfilment due to inconsistencies and manual drudgery in your partner processes. So, there is a high chance of losing opportunities and the experiences of end customers will suffer.
Overall,
So, there is a pressing need for a 3-tiered experience module that encompasses all touchpoints across the value chain including employees, partners and customers.
How Does Digital Enablement Help Build A 3-Tiered Experience Module?
Digital enablement is a humane, dynamic and people-centric process of empowering people to become super-productive. With the help of digital assistants that act as both interns and experts at once, digital enablement augments people to better perform their digital tasks.
By acting as interns, digital assistants intelligently automate repetitive, mundane and data-intensive tasks that a person does not want to spend time on. By acting as experts, they equip people with real-time insights, contextual knowledge and interactive help in natural language to excel at their work. Overall, partners can be equipped with digital fluency, enabling them to better use available technology, improve efficiency and drive outcomes.
Here are the specific ways in which digital enablement helps enrich PX and EX.
Improves Visibility
Information silos and non-alignment of information is a major challenge to EX and PX. Enterprises use a wide range of tools and technology that often create siloes and restrict process visibility and transparency. This, in turn affects customer experiences. With the use of AI-powered digital assistants, it is possible to integrate all information from across multiple sources and equip partners and employees with a 360-degree view of the end-customer. Enriched with these insights, they can craft personalized and seamless CX.
For instance, when dealers have visibility into available stock and product movement, they can book orders accordingly and keep the customers informed about expected date of delivery, etc. When sales databases are aligned between the enterprise and the partners, they will have better visibility in opportunities that arise, and maximize possibilities across the sales cycle.
Faster Decision-Making
The use of AI-powered digital assistants aids in faster, effective, data-driven decision-making across functions and processes. They offer real-time, actionable and contextual insights to employees and partners to make moments matter, reduce back and forth and take swift decisions that accelerate business value. For instance, based on shared analytics and contextual insights, partners could cross-sell and upsell your products, increase CSAT scores and thereby, elevate CX.
Self-Support
With a digital enablement platform, it is possible to deliver self-support to employees, partners and customers in a hassle-free manner. AI-powered digital assistants endowed with Natural Language Processing, voice recognition and speech-to-text capabilities can engage in meaningful conversations over chat or voice. For instance, the assistant can be trained to auto-fill forms and documents with simple voice commands.
With digital enablement platforms, enterprises can reduce support costs and overheads by 90% without compromising on the quality or seamlessness of support activities.
Your Very Own Super Avatar (Coming Soon)
Digital assistants help eliminate manual drudgery, data-intensive and repetitive tasks for employees as well as partners. With a digital enablement platform like the one offered by Supervity,ai, you simply need to show or tell the AI-powered assistant what needs to be done and it will mimic the actions. It is not an enterprise-level solution like RPA where existing workflows must be used, partners/ employees can choose tasks to automate based on the needs and context.
For instance, sales executives could get their NLP-powered Digital Work Assistants to take on the initial conversation in the lead engagement process or answer repetitive customer queries. They would hand-off the conversation to the executive with the history only when the assistant is not equipped to answer a query. Similarly, the assistant can be deployed to take on follow ups, referrals and feedback processes.
The Bottomline
Frictionless Employee Experiences and healthy Partner Experiences lead to seamless Customer Experiences and competitive advantages. And digital enablement makes a 3-tiered experience module not just a possibility, but a thriving reality.
References:
https://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/why-employee-experience-is-the-new-customer-experience/
https://www.axelerant.com/blog/your-partner-experience-px-matters-just-as-much
https://worldofwork.io/2020/03/employee-experience/
https://avtex.com/articles/6-ways-the-employee-experience-impacts-the-customer-experience