In brief
- When customer experience slips, most companies fix the front line: new training, new scripts, new tools. The problem often starts somewhere else.
- Good people can give customers more than they get, but not for long. How the company has set HR up to deliver is a big part of that.
- Five common beliefs keep leaders from seeing HR as part of the customer experience.
Here’s a pattern I’ve seen more than once. Reviews start to slip. Complaints go up. Leadership decides the front line needs help, so they bring in customer service training, roll out new scripts and maybe buy a better system for tracking tickets.
For a few weeks, things improve. Then they drift right back.
What nobody looked at was the experience the company had built for those same employees. Simple requests took weeks. Questions went to whoever happened to be available. Managers and HR gave different answers because nobody had ever decided what the answer should be. HR had been set up to keep the company compliant and the paperwork moving. It had never been asked to be part of the experience the company wanted to give its customers. So the employees went to training on how to make customers feel heard, then went back to a workplace that hadn’t been designed to make them feel heard.
You can train people on how to treat customers. You can’t train them out of how they’re being treated.
Five myths about customer experience
Myth 1: “Customer experience is a front-line training problem.”
Training helps. It teaches people what good service looks like. But it can’t hold up for long against what people experience every day at work.
If an employee spends their week chasing answers, getting bounced between departments and waiting on promises nobody keeps, that’s the model of service they’re living inside. Sooner or later it’s the one they pass on. I walk through how closely the two mirror each other in What Your Customers Don’t Like, Your Employees Don’t Like Either.
Myth 2: “Our people are paid to be great with customers, whatever’s going on inside.”
People can put on a good face for a while. Most do. But it costs them something every time, and the cost adds up.
The employee who’s frustrated with how the company treats them doesn’t usually snap at a customer. They just stop going the extra step. They do what’s required and nothing more. Customers can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it.
Myth 3: “HR is back office. Customers never see it.”
Customers never see your HR team. They see what HR produced: the person who was hired, how well they were onboarded, whether they know the policy, whether they’re still there next month.
This connection isn’t new. Harvard Business School researchers described it in “Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work”, and Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis found teams in the top quartile of engagement see 10% higher customer loyalty and engagement than teams in the bottom quartile.
When a company files HR under back office, it leaves one of its biggest customer experience levers out of the plan. HR may sit in the back office. What it delivers walks out to the front.
Myth 4: “We’ll fix the employee side once things settle down.”
Things rarely settle down on their own. And while you wait, the cost compounds.
People leave. New people come in who don’t know your customers yet. The ones who stay pick up the slack and get more tired. Customers start dealing with a new face every few months and have to explain themselves again. Putting the employee side off doesn’t protect customer experience. It slowly wears it down. If this sounds familiar, Why Great People Stay is worth a read.
Myth 5: “Our engagement survey tells us how employees feel.”
An engagement survey is a snapshot. It usually happens once a year, and it asks about the big moments: how people feel about their manager, their pay, their future.
But HR is experienced every day. Every question, every request, every call, from the day someone applies to the day they leave. That’s where most of the frustration lives, and most surveys never ask about it. You can have a decent engagement score and still have a daily experience nobody ever designed.
This isn’t HR’s fault
When leaders do start looking at the employee side, HR often ends up taking the blame. It’s the easy conclusion. HR is where the requests go, so HR must be where things break.
In most companies I’ve worked with, that’s not what happened. HR was never invited into the conversation about customer experience. It was staffed to handle compliance, payroll questions and whatever came up that week. Nobody asked it to deliver an experience, and nobody gave it the room, the budget or the authority to design one.
HR can’t redesign how it shows up on its own. That takes a company that decides the experience its people get is part of the experience its customers get, and then lets HR build it.
Side by side
| The myth | What’s actually happening |
|---|
| Training | Better training fixes service | Employees pass on the service they get |
| Emotional effort | People can be great no matter what | People stop going the extra step |
| Back office | Customers never see HR | Customers see everything HR produced |
| Timing | Fix it once things settle down | Turnover keeps resetting the experience |
| Measurement | The survey tells us how people feel | The daily HR experience goes unmeasured |
The verdict
Your customer experience has a limit, and it’s set inside the company. Good people can push past it for a while, often at their own cost, but they can’t hold it there. How the company has positioned HR is a big part of that.
That doesn’t mean front-line training is a waste. It means training can’t carry the whole load. If you want customers to feel heard, helped and taken care of, the people serving them need to feel that way first. That starts when the company treats HR as an extension of the experience it wants to give customers, not as a separate department that handles the paperwork.
That’s the idea behind HRX™, the HR experience: designing how HR is delivered so the experience your people get matches the one you want your customers to get. And it starts with knowing who your company is, which I get into in 3 Ways Culture as a Personality Changes How HR Is Delivered.
Questions worth asking
- The last time customer experience slipped, did anyone look at what employees were experiencing at the same time?
- Has HR ever been part of your conversations about customer experience?
- Does HR have what it needs to deliver the experience you’d want your employees to get?
Read next: HRX vs. EX vs. CX: What’s the Difference?
Frequently asked questions
Can customer experience be better than employee experience?
For a short time, maybe. Over time, employees pass on the experience they get. When the internal experience is frustrating, it shows up in how customers are served.
How does HR affect customer experience?
HR shapes who gets hired, how they’re onboarded, whether they get clear answers and whether they stay. Customers see the results of all of it through the people serving them.
Why doesn’t customer service training fix customer experience?
Training teaches people what good service looks like. It can’t outweigh what they experience every day at work. If the internal experience doesn’t change, results tend to drift back.
Isn’t employee experience the same as HR experience?
Not quite. Employee experience usually focuses on big moments, like the first day or a promotion. The HR experience happens every day, in every question and request, and it includes employee experience.
