Dive Brief:

• The vast majority of CEOs, 95%, say blended customer experience and employee experience strategies will positively affect growth, according to NTT’s State of CX 2023 report. But the rate of companies with employee experience strategies is lagging behind that of those with CX strategies.
• An MIT Technology Review Insights report, released Thursday, highlighted three ways to improve the employee experience: to personalize the workplace, empower employees to engage with customers’ on the company’s values, and to provide employees with the technology, including AI, to make their jobs easier. 
• While executives told MIT Technology Review that contact center employees are paramount to business success as the face of their brand, recruitment and retention remain pain points. A 2022 MIT Technology Review Insights survey of CX leaders found that 96% struggle to recruit service agents.

Dive Insight:

Business leaders know that customer experience and employee experience are intertwined. If an employee is happy in their position, they’re more likley to provide better service.

But while 97% of CEOs say they have a CX strategy, only 81% say they have an EX strategy, according to the NTT report.

The MIT Technology Review Insights report found that employees are looking for the same things as customers from a brand: personalization, values and efficiency.

“To build an engaged and high-performing workforce, organizations need to reshape their employee value proposition to mirror their customer proposition for fast, convenient, and personalized experiences with a brand that shows leadership on sustainable business practices,” the report read.

Key to that are personalization and empowering employees to do their best work. These are especially important among Gen Z, a generation that is increasingly making up contact center employees and who are harder to retain, the report found.

“A lot of companies think it's about pushing a message and winning the hearts of their employees. And it's not really about that,” Leah Leachman, a senior director analyst at Gartner, told CX Dive. “Most employees do really care about customers, but it's: Are you enabling me? Are you supporting me to live up to your brand promise that you've made publicly? And do we have the resources?”