Employees are the new customer: Why fusing the employee and customer experience is essential

Don't tell my boss, but in this extended work-from-home era, I find myself jumping between business and consumer apps more and more. Each time I leave Amazon or Netflix or WhatsApp, I can’t help but compare my customer experience to my experience as an employee.

In most cases, I find that the consumer-focused applications I use are more attuned to my preferences, needs, and habits. I bet many of you feel the same.

What if businesses approached the employee experience in the same way? And why is it so important, especially now?   

The biggest HR challenge facing businesses today—and how CX can help

Employee retention is essential in competitive sectors. However, The Great Resignation—spurred by the stress and shifting priorities brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—is a trend that’s likely to hold.

According to industry experts at McKinsey & Company, in 2022, one of the greatest challenges for Chief Human Resources Officers and businesses at large will be attracting and retaining talent.

In September 2021, McKinsey Quarterly reported that 19 million employees had resigned since April of that year in the US alone.

To better understand this shift, the international consulting firm conducted a multi-industry survey of 5,774 employees and 250 managers across the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Singapore. They found that 40% of employees were “at least somewhat likely” to leave their job in the next 3–6 months.

More than half of employers surveyed said they’d had higher rates of “voluntary turnover,” and most expected to lose more talent in 2022. That expectation seems to have held true, as a recent news release from the US Bureau of Labor revealed that 4.3 million people left their jobs in January 2022.

Of the employees who had already left their positions within six months of the survey, 36% did so without another job offer in play.

“The exit threshold has never been higher,” said Juergen Lindner, Oracle SVP of SaaS Applications, in a recent episode of the HR Happy Hour podcast on managing talent in 2022. “Everyone is working remotely…. The physical things that hinder real mobility are gone.”

Applying a customer-centric approach to employee experiences

Ultimately, we know that happy employees mean happy customers and a healthier business. But the Great Resignation trend shows how important the day-to-day employee experience really is.

What steps can you take to elevate your employee experience and start treating your workers more like customers?

Think back to your preferred consumer applications and what makes them so appealing. It can often be very simple, content-related changes that make a real difference for empowerment, engagement, and satisfaction.

Consider the following tools from the CX wheelhouse and how you can apply them to Human Capital Management (HCM):

Engaging, dynamic content

From long reads to snackable videos on any device, share useful information with employees in engaging, diverse formats that are easy to create and update.

High-quality personalization

Show them you’re invested in their ongoing satisfaction and well-being by enhancing personalized employee journeys with fresh, quality content—from well-being to safety.

Modern delivery methods

Deliver information to employees via the channels that are the most convenient for them—from web, to chatbot, to mobile.

Simple, seamless integration

Give your employees seamless access to the products and services they need throughout the employee lifecycle—all in a simple, unified HR content hub.

How Oracle is improving our own employee experience with CX solutions

Here at Oracle, we integrated our Oracle HCM and Oracle Content Management applications to deliver engaging content and create a seamless experience for more than 100,000 employees and 400,000 customers alike. Here are just a few of the amazing results we saw:

• We eliminated 71% of the time it took to conduct talent reviews.
• We cut more than 27,000 hours of administrative time.
• In the fiscal year following the implementation, we initiated about 20,000 promotions and other job changes, a 63% increase over the previous year.

“We chose Oracle Content Management, not just because it’s our own,” says Chris Stone, SVP of Content and Collaboration, “but because it’s the only tool that can solve the problems that we face as a very large, diverse, and complex global organization.”

Chris cited bi-monthly enhancements, unlimited users, multi-channel delivery, and its pre-integration with Oracle Advertising and CX as key differentiators. One of the greatest benefits, though, is that it gives employees and partners the freedom to create content and share knowledge.

OCM-based features like the employee portal MyOracle and the file-sharing system OraDocs also make it easier for employees to access the resources they need to excel in their roles, build on their skillsets, and advance their careers within Oracle.

Hear more from Chris about this Oracle@Oracle success story and how such integrations can help you drive business success and enhance employee experiences across your organization.

Where to begin combining CX practices with HCM

In their survey of employees and employers, McKinsey & Company found that most employers didn’t understand what their employees wanted, or what was driving them to leave.

“By not understanding what their employees are running from, and what they might gravitate to, company leaders are putting their very businesses at risk,” the McKinsey Quarterly report states.

Without insight into the current employee experience, it’s impossible to develop the right solutions—or to harness the full power of CX in your HCM systems.

To get started, contact our experts for a free employee experience assessment. Just ask for #merge via chat.

Learn more about some of the successes Oracle has experienced since implementing Oracle HCM and why we moved our organization to the cloud.