Sharon Boyd utilising Employee Experience to drive Business Growth
During our October addition of CX Centric Conversation, we explored how co-creating the employee experience could be used to drive business growth. Sharon Boyd, Chief Customer Officer from MKL Innovation, opened the session with a very powerful keynote.
Driving Growth through Employee Experience Management
She spoke at length and shared great ideas concerning CX (Customer experience) which is basically an interaction between an organisation and its customers over a duration of their relationship and EX (Employee experience) which is basically the experiential benefits of employment.
Boyd is a versatile women who happens to be the Chief Customer Officer for MKL Innovation, a Internet of Things solutions provider. She is also Director at the Customer lnstitute and is currently studying towards her Masters in Business. Boyd has also led various teams including the College Advocates, thus making her very experienced and well informed when it comes to employee experience and customer experience.
Sharon Boyd MKL Innovation
Boyd started off her presentation by exploring the link between CX and EX, stating that the two complement each other thus most companies that excel in CX are highly likely to have engaged employees, as this leads to many benefits for the organisation, including less churn. Furthermore she touched base on service behaviours, which she says are part of MKL’s CX strategy which serve to align to the culture and brand of the organisation.
Co-creation, which Miss Boyd simply put as a collaboration, was also another topic she discussed. This collaboration occurs when different parties(e.g employees and customers) joined together in order to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome(e.g. customer loyalty, employee loyalty, more improved customer oriented service offerings etc). She also mentioned Hackathons as an example of a successful co-creation. Some of the tools that she mentioned in aiding the company in its co-creation process include Gemba walks (involving employees on fixing the company’s touch points), service safaris (experiencing your own services as the user) and Appreciative inquiry.
The Importance of Diversity and Inclusion to drive Business Growth
Further into her presentation, Boyd touched on a very interesting subject: Diversity and inclusion. Here, she spoke about the structure and achievements of the employee experience program she led with College Advocates, and explained how they matched the teams to be representatives of the customers they serve. This she said, is imperative for an organisation to do as it encourages people to concentrate on value add for the business by actively participating in the organisation’s activities.
In closing her presentation, Boyd brought out one of the most important elements in CX and EX: leadership and culture. She mentioned the impact of leaders which can be positive or negative based on what the leaders do and the decisions they take thus this affects employees and these employees have a direct influence of customer outcomes. With this in place, Boyd then mentioned that it is imperative for an organisation to have a leader who is well familiar and skilled in both CX and EX as this will save organisations lots of money. She stressed the importance of culture in an organisation as it affects the happiness, well being and satisfaction of both customers and employees, hence driving business growth.
CX Centric Conversations are global interactive discussions about Customer Experience. These are hosted by Jonathan Daniels.
