Every business has goals outside their balance sheet. Ultimately, though, your revenue is a high priority. After all, businesses exist to make money, and you can’t work toward your more altruistic goals if you can’t keep the doors open. It makes sense to prioritize projects that will obviously make you money, but many businesses mistakenly think their employee experience isn’t one of them.

The truth is that your customer and employee experience are inextricably linked. For that reason, your employees’ satisfaction, career path, work environment, and other factors will always have a direct impact on your finances. Allow us to explain why and how to begin strengthening the employee and customer experience today.

How Does the Employee Experience Impact the Customer Experience?

If you’re not hitting the revenue you had hoped for, it’s important to take a look at your employee experience strategy. Your employee experience has a direct impact on your customer experience (and your revenue as a result) for several reasons.

More Positive Customer Interactions

We’ve all felt how contagious a positive or negative mood can be. When your employees feel happy, fulfilled, and satisfied with their jobs, that positivity will come through in their interactions with customers. This creates a better experience for customers who are more likely to want to continue buying from you and refer their friends to you too.

Sure, businesses always instruct employees to give customers “service with a smile,” but customers can tell the difference between a fake smile to get through the interaction and authentic positivity. It’s worth an investment to make your employees genuinely happy.

More Consistency in the Customer Experience

Unless your business happens to be a haunted house, customers always want to know what to expect. They prefer businesses that can deliver a reliable, consistent experience, and a strong employee experience is one of the best ways to provide this.

First of all, a better employee experience leads to lower employee turnover. No matter how much documentation you have or how much you’ve streamlined your process, there will be some variation when there are constantly new employees coming and going.

Second, a good employee experience should be one that embodies your brand. If your brand is all about hospitality and empathy, for example, the best way to make sure your employees are interacting with customers in an on-brand way is to create an employee experience that has the same atmosphere. You can’t create a high-competition, intense work environment and expect employees to suddenly turn on serenity and compassion when they’re in front of customers.

Improved Customer Loyalty

There are many reasons customers become loyal to a particular business, but in some cases, it has more to do with your employees than anything else. For instance, every “regular” who goes back to the same restaurant or store time and again because they’ve gotten to know the staff and they feel understood.

Of course, this bond between your employees and customers won’t happen if you have a revolving door of employees. A better employee experience leads to employees staying longer, which allows them to develop more relationships with customers and garner customer loyalty.

More Knowledgeable Decisions from the Top

Part of a strong employee experience is a promising future for employees, including opportunities for advancement. Sure, there are plenty of outside hires who have talent, but promoting from within will give you a leadership team who knows your customers, your system, and your brand inside and out. They’re more likely to be able to identify ways to improve your customers’ experience and drive more business as a result.

More Positive Brand Image

Consumers’ knowledge of businesses and their motivations for making decisions has changed. More and more customers today are making their buying choices based on the ethics of businesses and their leaders. And thanks to our social media-saturated world, they have more information to guide those decisions.

If you create a negative work environment or treat your employees poorly, customers will know. The opposite is true too: if employees feel appreciated and treated fairly, word will get around about that too. Either way, your employee experience will affect the way customers view your business and your leadership team’s ethics, and this will impact their spending.

How Does Employee Engagement Impact the Customer Experience?

Employee engagement is one aspect of the employee experience, but it has a strong enough effect on your customer experience that it’s worth discussing on its own. For employees at every level and department of your business, customer experience and employee engagement are directly linked.

When employees are more engaged, they’re paying more attention to your customers. They’re watching what policies or practices seem to be frustrating customers and they’re listening to feedback from customers about what the business can do better.

Not only are engaged employees more likely to pick up on ways and ideas for improving your business but they’re more invested in your company’s success so they’re also more likely to pass that information up the ladder. Engaged employees in every aspect of your business are more likely to come up with and act upon ideas to boost your revenue.

How to Begin Growing Your Revenue by Improving Your Employee Experience

Now that you know why enhancing your employee experience will improve your bottom line, the natural next step is how. How can you start strengthening your employee experience and reaping the rewards?

It all begins with an employee experience survey. Our AI-driven survey tool GroupSolver offers specialized solutions for employee experience. Our platform helps you design your survey and uses advanced crowdsourcing technology to allow respondents to evaluate popular answers, and then synthesizes employees’ open-ended answers into quantifiable, practical takeaways.

To start boosting your revenue through a better employee experience today, learn more about GroupSolver and how we can empower your strategy.