Good businesses understand that the process of finding, attracting and selling to customers looks a lot like the recruitment, hiring and retention of good employees. The dual processes of creating good employee experience and good customer experience can be optimized.

The job of the business analyst is to understand these processes and bring particular insights into the optimization of each.

What Will You Measure?

At first glance, customers and employees are on very different journeys. But there is considerable overlap that makes for interesting data collection and analysis.

Company Growth

Who is an ideal customer? What does that person want? These questions lie at the heart of customer recruiting. Answering them correctly can mean helping a company to grow without wasting advertising dollars.

"Researching the needs and pain points of your typical customers and mapping out their journey will give you a good picture of the kinds of people who are trying to achieve a goal with your company. Thus, you can hone in your marketing to that specific audience," writes Aaron Agius, coauthor of “Faster, Smarter, Louder.”

Imagine how a similar technique might work when applied to employee recruitment. If a company identified personas that align with the company’s goals, searches for qualified candidates could be more effective, which in turn might improve employee retention.

Key Relationships

Customers who have a negative experience with employees may take their business elsewhere. The deciding incident can be anything from encountering a rude agent to having trouble getting a problem resolved.

"Agencies that succeed in making bad incidents as rare as possible have more satisfied customers than those that don’t," Tony D’Emidio and Jonah Wagner write at McKinsey & Company in an article regarding government agencies. People tend to remember bad incidents more than good ones, so limiting them whenever possible is a smart business strategy.

Examining customer journeys and digging into pain points can help companies smooth their workflows so they can serve customers better. Sometimes that analysis also helps leaders to pinpoint employees who need to brush up on interpersonal skills.

Similar issues can impact the employee experience. An overbearing boss, a patronizing coworker or an absent CEO can leave workers feeling less engaged. That dissatisfaction might bleed into their relationships with customers. Examining employee workflows could uncover employee-to-employee conflict which could in turn lead to critical staffing changes, a more engaged workforce and happier customers.

Solution Sets

A company that offers just what a customer wants at just the right time is likely to be successful. Unfortunately, that can be rare.

For example, a PwC study, 32 percent of U.S. consumers say it’s necessary for a business to have the most up-to-date technology for a successful customer experience. However, just 10 percent of companies made better digital customer experiences a priority in 2017, down from 25 percent in 2016.

This disconnect between what customers want and what companies deliver also happens on the employee side. But that issue can remain buried, especially if employees aren't able to clearly define what they want.

An employee may say, for example, that the break room needs softer couches. But what that employee might need is a better work/life balance, so couch napping is no longer necessary.

Managers can dig a little deeper into requests. Justin Rosenstein, cofounder of work management platform Asana, encourages managers to evaluate employee requests as they would customer feature requests. What are these people actually trying to accomplish?

Measurement could help answer that question. You might discover that a customer issue (a poor digital experience) leads to an employee concern (too many customer complaints). One suggestion (a new website) might solve them both.

Churn

Companies use churn analysis to determine customer retention. That same mindset could help executives understand how often their employees leave for other opportunities. And that could lead to powerful solutions.

"Through this data-driven approach, HR analytics can illuminate the major causes of attrition, and new policies, along with training programs, can be put in place to help mitigate the problem," the team at enterprise analytics and mobility software provider MicroStrategy writes.

Churn reports could also help you identify if and when employees and customers are leaving the company in waves, all at once. If churn is tied to new feature releases, for example, you might help to smooth the issue for both sides.

Go Beyond Basic Data Collection

So far, we've talked about the areas you might examine as a business analyst. Now, it's time to think about how you'll gather the data that means the most to your company.

Define The Customer/Employee Journey

Improving an experience, whether related to customers or employees, begins with understanding the journey. The path people take is longer than you might think.

According to behavior analytics platform Hotjar.com, the customer experience includes every touchpoint, from the moment a person finds out about you to the moment they call to complain about the product or ask customer service for help.

Map out that journey. Identify all of the moments an ideal customer might come into contact with your company. How will they find out about you? Will they meet you in person or online? How do they place an order? How many steps must they complete to return an item or complain?

Then, turn your attention to your employees and their experience with the company. Start with how a prospect finds out about a job and the application process. How does training work? How long until the person can expect a promotion? Consider performance reviews and exit interviews too.

Identify True Pain Points

With the journey defined, it's time to dig into the pain points that require a solution.

You might be tempted to use productivity tools that measure how fast a step is completed or how often something gets done. But those reports don't always uncover the human part of the work. You may not even spot issues, and if you do, you may not understand how they happened.

"The result? A disconnect between leadership believing they have insight into the employee experience while never truly understanding the source of pain points, preferences, needs, and motivations. This creates a rift where the employee’s perception is leadership does not care about their actual experience in the trenches," explains Megan Geyer, director of customer experience at global IT services and consulting provider NTT Data.

Don’t rely solely on data. Look at your journey map, and try to complete each step you’ve identified. Order a product, apply for a job, and otherwise put yourself inside of the experience. Take notes, and identify the spots that cause you trouble. You'll validate those ideas in the next step.

Conduct Interviews and Fieldwork

To really understand what's happening, you'll need to talk with both employees and customers.

Customer feedback is built into many project management methodologies, including scrum and agile. As a BA, you might be accustomed to conducting user testing sessions, and know how to ask questions to elicit meaningful answers. You can use that same approach to help you understand employees.

"It’s time for you to “empathize” with your employees, follow them around, survey and interview them, and sit down with them in workshops. They will tell you what bugs them at work, and you’ll hear all sorts of little things that make work difficult," writes industry analyst and consultant Josh Bersin.

Set Aside the Net Promoter Score

When deadlines are looming and you're searching for a simple way to present customer or employee sentiment, you might be tempted to lean on your net promoter score (NPS). This simple number tells executives how likely customers are to recommend a company to another purchaser or how likely employees (with an eNPS) are to recommend that company to people looking for a job.

NPS has merit. It's a quick temperature check that you can complete with just one question. But it does have a few limitations.

"To be effective, measuring engagement should be established as a process rather than a single event that enables the company to hear and respond to employee needs in a timely and focused way," writes organizational psychologist Justyna Krzych.

If you include NPS in your reporting, ensure that all of your other data collection and interview results also appear. These will add nuance to your analysis, and that could help your company make smarter decisions.

Present Meaningful Solutions

It's easy to get stuck in a rut of grabbing data, writing reports and repeating that work. But you can do more.

Analysts freed from rote report generation can probe for company weak spots and identify key solutions, says Ian Cook, vice president of people solutions at workforce intelligence solutions provider Visier. Rather than simply sharing numbers, you could provide helpful suggestions.

For example, if your data shows that customers complain about long hold times and customer service staff experiences churn due to angry customers, solving the long hold times satisfies the customer and employee at the same time.

As your analysis deepens, you'll need to measure how well your solutions work and how your company is changing. Rachel Lane, solution principal at Medallia, points out that consistent measurement ensures that real changes are made, especially shifts in the employee experience.

If you suggest a solution, identify how you'll measure success. Define your metrics, and then outline how often you'll report back with progress.

You may find issues that apply to just one audience and not the other. That's perfectly fine. No two sets of people have exactly the same wants, needs and pain points. Searching for those moments of intersection, however, where solving one problem makes both groups happy can help transform both the customer and employee experience.

How Business Analysts Can Optimize Processes to Improve Employee and Customer Experience