Today's Tech-savvy consumers demand more, expect more and have a plethora of choices available in the market than ever before. Brand trust and loyalty are no longer guaranteed with customers willing to move to a different brand with far superior customer experience (CX), ease of use and seamless customer journey. With the advancement of technology and ease of access to new innovative tools, there is a spurred growth in the rate of new businesses ready to disrupt veterans in the industry. The need to deliver superior customer experience, hence, has become more important than ever for both survival and continued growth of businesses today.

Delivering to the expectations of the customers cannot happen without the support of engaged and motivated employees. It is here that the role of an effective and enhanced employee experience (EX) assumes importance. An engaged and involved employee is highly productive and acts as a brand ambassador for the company. Motivated employees can transform the growth story for any business, whereas disengaged and frustrated employees can drag the business and look for avenues to move out.

CX Today Needs EX

When customer experience (CX) is critical for business growth and acts as the differentiator for modern business today, it is equally important to focus on employee experience (EX), if customer expectations and demands are to be met. Customer satisfaction is an essential outcome of a truly satisfying employee experience. Organizations cannot afford to overlook employee experience and must understand the frictions and the pain points in their overall journey, including the onboarding process, daily work experience, seamless digital workplace practices, performance reviews, engagement and collaboration.

Hence, the time has come when businesses must shift their focus towards greater employee engagement and satisfaction. The need is to leverage modern, innovative collaboration and engagement technologies and platforms along with an in-depth understanding of employee preference and experience journey. These technologies can greatly help to connect employees better, share and communicate from different locations, allow for remote exchange to collaborate with teams.

The need for Digital Workplace Tools

Companies today, hence, need to leverage modern enterprise-wide collaboration technologies like Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams for easy access and seamless experience as well as to ensure access and adoption of these technologies, for an overall productive implementation. The focus of employee experience will have to account for daily experience of employees on an ongoing basis, rather than limited phases of the employee life cycle. The whole exercise towards enhancing EX is to pass on the message to your employees that you care about them, which translates into a motivated and engaged employee delivering higher productivity and superior customer experience. Collaboration tools are helping bridge the limitations for employees who cannot meet face-to-face on a regular basis and help them connect and collaborate remotely.

Microsoft Teams - An Integrated and Seamless Platform for Collaboration

Microsoft Teams allows for integration of different workflows together to share ideas, communicate, collaborate for different projects and products and discuss feedbacks through different mediums including text chats to audio chats and video conferencing. Business today are struggling and overloading, multiple set of disaggregated products for different requirements, leading to complexity and confusion. Teams, on the other hand, comes with an inbuilt feature to integrate multiple productivity tools without the need to exit the Teams interface and allows your employees to add their favorite applications within the platform. Teams seamlessly allows to integrate all the Office 365 applications including SharePoint, Yammer, OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint and others. External applications like Dropbox, HootSuite, Google Drive, Zendesk, Power BI, Trello and much more can be easily integrated with the Microsoft Teams platform along with Twitter and YouTube like services.

Text, Audio and Video Chat Workflow Feature of Teams

Microsoft Teams allows for multiple ways of connecting, collaborating and sharing for your employees. The text chat conversation workflow offered by Teams helps your employees seamlessly communicate just like the best messenger platform, say, Skype for Business and helps employees flawlessly revisit their chat history and missed conversations with an obvious ability to express their moods and emotions through well-crafted GIFs. Similarly, audio chat workflow provided by Teams offer an alternative for your employees to have more personal and preferred voice communication- eliminating confusions and in general typing delay and errors during text chats. Microsoft Teams also comes with a seamless video chat workflow, helping employees connect and collaborate with a better and visual understanding and body language of the person on the other side.

Added Features

This Microsoft Office 365 suite offers added features like a built-in calendar for meeting schedules, an intuitive interface, multiple ways to join either individual or group chat and desktop screen sharing- eliminating the need for projectors. The flexible and dynamic nature of Teams allows your employees to experiment and learn new ways to explore and discover the best applications and way of collaborating and better ways of working in due course after implementation.

Promoting the Culture of Collaboration

Providing and implementing collaboration tools are the first step towards an engaging and improvised employee experience. The next step is to encourage and inculcate a culture of collaboration among employees and helping them adapt to newer ways of sharing and collaboration. Employees need to be incentivized for an increased adoption of collaboration for sharing ideas and opinions and giving feedback. The process of diffusion of the new tools is time taking but with the right implementation and knowledge sharing, organizations can reap huge benefits. Elevated employee experience is bound to propel the customer-centricity goals of any organization.

Espire Infolabs has been working with various organizations across several domains to build collaborative digital workplaces and empower businesses to run efficiently. We map user journeys to drive improved employee engagement, seamless operations and revenue growth for global businesses. For any query on Digital Workplace implementation, get in touch with us at marketing@espire.com