Better content is bilateral.
Human beings aren’t mindless consumers.
Sure, we consume, but our consumption experience matters. Modern organizations are starting to realize this, which is one of the main reasons the producer-consumer relationship now compared to 20 years ago is like night and day.
Companies figured out that investing in people — both customers and employees — will ultimately serve their business goals better.
Entire organizations are dedicated to experience management (XM) and spend their time postulating on how to hone the human experiences that are pivotal to corporate success. Two of those experiences are customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).
These are both broad subjects that have already filled more space than this article has room for, so we’re going to narrow our focus on how your organization's content influences CX and EX.
But, first, let’s look at the basics of the two experiences.
Customer Experience & Employee Experience: Buzzword Battle
CX, EX, XM, the list goes on. There are acronyms for everything. If you’re familiar with CX but new to EX, you’re not alone. EX is a pivotal part of a well-rounded organization.
For years, businesses have been funneling resources into CX. After all, good customer experience makes sense from a sales and revenue perspective. Time passed, companies got wise and started linking employee experience to customer experience.
A logical step; after all, the employees create everything that enters into a customer’s experience, so it’s not a blind leap. Experience management leader Qualtrics says this about employee experience:
“From the moment someone looks at your job opening, to the moment they leave your company, everything that the worker learns, does, sees, and feels contributes to their employee experience.”
Using that definition, we can change a few words around to help define customer experience.
From the moment someone looks at your product, to the moment they buy it, and further into being an existing customer, everything they learn, do, see, and feel related to your organization contributes to their customer experience.
Two sides of the same coin.
But now, we must shift our attention to content. Specifically, how content relates to and connects CX and EX.
Where Content & People Converge
It’s in the term personalization. You build content for people.
An example:
Think of customers as students in a classroom.
Your organization is the teacher and your product is the subject of the class.
It’s your goal to convince those students that your subject is valuable and to help them become proficient at that subject.
Each student is different, sees your subject differently, and will learn differently. This is where your curriculum — or content — comes into play.
And, where personalization is crucial. You want to convince every student of the value of your subject, but one version of content won’t do that successfully. Content needs to be tailored and it’s your job to do the tailoring.
Care in content design reflects care for differentiated needs.
The care your organization puts into designing content for customers shows that your organization recognizes and cares for their different needs, wants, use cases, etc.
But, where do employees enter into it? Well think back to our teacher in the classroom. A well-designed curriculum doesn’t just help the student, it also empowers the teacher. Curriculum design matters, just like your content. Rather than making your content a canned script for every customer to read and hopefully understand, build your content upon the strengths your employees have at addressing your product. Then assign them to customers whose needs match those strengths.
Put simply, content is never one-size-fits-all and that applies to both customers and employees. This calls for content strategy that transcends the traditional labels attached to content and making people-first content that elevates your product by highlighting value.
Let’s look at a couple of real-life scenarios that demonstrate how employee experience feeds directly into customer experience.
For Your Sales Team
For product-oriented organizations, product and service documentation is content that’s essential for your sales team to learn the product enough to sell prospects on its benefits. This means that there have to be learning and training systems properly set up with learning content to onboard and train those sales agents.
Once onboarded and trained, those agents will go to market with knowledge from content that matches customer demands because it was developed with employee-facing value and customer-facing value in mind. By having the correct information, sales teams are then better able to connect customers with what they need.
For Your Customer Support Team
The land of problem-solving. Nothing solves problems better than a good library of learning content. When a customer comes to the support team with a product issue, support needs access to the most up-to-date content to address whatever customer issues come their way. The more accurate the content, the more accurate the solution. Your CS team will blaze through tickets because everything is where it needs to be and is built with, again, both parties in mind.
Those are but two examples of how content directly affects employee experience and customer experience. Think about how you can similar scenarios to your organization’s circumstances — whether those circumstances are unique or common, content built for employees and customers alike will pull twice the weight.
Bridging CX & EX Is The Content Job That Never Ends
Employee experience and customer experience through your content is something that’s continually evolving. Set-and-forget content doesn’t work. Your most careful plans might work for a time, but the idea is to continue sharpening your content according to feedback from internal and external experiences.
This means, never stop getting feedback, never stop learning, never stop testing. And guess what? Not everything will work perfectly! But that’s okay.
It’s part of the journey of optimizing your content for diverse experiences.
