The customer experience movement truly began to take off in the 1990s as companies moved from a basic focus on customer satisfaction towards more sophisticated customer relationship management and customer experience.

In Humans At Work, NYU SPS’s Dr. Anna Tavis and Stela Lupushor highlight five distinct stages of the customer-centric journey that they believe provide clear guidance as we move through very similar stages in the employee experience journey.

1. Stage 1 – process improvement. In the first phase, they highlight how companies were focused on process improvement via approaches such as Six Sigma and Total Quality Management. For more traditional organizations, this is probably where many HR functions still reside, their work very much focused around eking as much out efficiency from the workforce as possible.
2. Stage 2 – focus on customer satisfaction. This phase then evolved into a more complete focus on the satisfaction of customers, with various tools and models developed to ensure this happened. This phase saw product development oriented around what would deliver the greatest boost to customer satisfaction. Internally, this corresponds with a general focus on employees, with the likes of Virgin and HCL openly stating that employees come first in the belief that doing so will result in customers ultimately being satisfied too.
3. Stage 3 – the rise of customer relationship management. This corresponded with a growing range of CRM tools to help companies manage customer relationships. This period was also marked by the tremendous growth in the amount of data available about customers, which represented a golden age of market research. The dot-com era has seen a similar array of tools being developed inside the organization to support the employee and enable them to thrive.
4. Stage 4 – customer experience. In the marketing world, we have moved away from thinking the product or service is key to thinking about the experience that consumers derive from that product and service. Similarly, Tavis and Lupushor believe that we need to move beyond looking at employment just through the lens of it being a job and look instead at the experience people gain while at work.

“There is a new realization that an organization’s overall success is becoming increasingly dependent on the quality of the relationship between the organization and its employees,” they explain. “At the same time, it offered incredible opportunities for the future of work, the workplace, and the workforce, coming full circle back to Drucker’s original insight about the importance of treating employees as people.”

Just as marketers are increasingly utilizing technologies like AI to deliver personalized products and services to consumers, Tavis and Lupushor hope that the future of work will be inherently personal, with this moving beyond the well-meant but inevitably broad buckets that encapsulate the DEI movement and truly treat employees as individuals.

We can all be somewhat guilty of taking a siloed approach to our work, but Tavis and Lupushor remind us that we can learn a lot from looking out of our immediate world and incorporate insights from other disciplines.