No one would argue customer experience (CX) isn’t important. But could employee experience (EX) reign supreme?
The nature of language industry work has been evolving rapidly over the last couple of years due to disruptive forces such as automation and artificial intelligence. Never mind the aftereffects of a pandemic, through which large segments of the localization workforce got used to working from home.
Customer experience has long been touted as the ultimate barometer for the health of companies, but isn’t the employee experience just as foundational to business performance? Improving your brand or product and building a strong customer experience certainly requires the support of your employees. It only seems logical that when you improve the happiness of your employees, it will impact how hard they work or how invested they are in the improvement of your company.
A Deloitte Insights study about how to improve the employee experience and corporate culture found that nearly 80% of executives rated employee experience very important (42 percent) or important (38 percent), but only 22 percent reported that their companies were excellent at building a differentiated employee experience.
Hiring activity in the language industry is at an all-time high, and with the skills gap widening, employers continue to struggle to hire appropriately trained workers. The search for talent is fierce, and an optimized EX is one of the best new ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Millennials in the workplace behave differently to the generations before them and are looking to have a bigger say. To attract them to your brand, addressing corporate culture is becoming more and more important as well.
Increasingly, there are expectations for personalized user experiences on both the client and the employee side. Localization workers, like any others, expect they’ll be treated as a unique person, just like they are when they interact with B2C brands as a consumer.
The ever-greater role social media is playing in our lives has also made the potential for negative feedback going viral a lot more prevalent.
All these factors mean that companies should be motivated now more than ever to work on providing a seamless and transparent employee experience. Employees are the most important asset of any company, wouldn’t you agree?
