Business leaders understand that having happy and loyal advocates is the result of a thriving customer experience practice. Looking from the outside-in, how do you cultivate an employee experience that creates happy, productive and loyal team members? That’s the $11 billion question.

Over the last several years, there’s one thing many executives and CEOs will tell you: Employees matter and there’s an indisputable link between a company’s employee experience and the experience they deliver to their customers. Just like the focus on customer experience, employee experience has become a buzzworthy cause. But behind the buzz, there are practical applications to help move the experience needle for your employees and your customers. And, ultimately, this helps your bottom line. Like developing a customer experience practice, your employee experience practice isn’t a siloed function of one department. Rather, it’s shouldered by the entire organization.

Your best customer experience starts with your employees. Here are three elements that, when executed properly, have a positive impact on the experiences your customers have with your brand.

  1. Hire Right: Alignment

This seems like a no-brainer. But often, we get caught up in the keywords and focus too hard on certain task competencies for a role. That often leads to overlooking hiring for the right behaviors. All things being equal, it’s expected for your potential new employee to have the job competencies. But they also must demonstrate the right behaviors to complement your company’s customer-centric culture.

It’s important for your employees to be aligned with your brand’s mission and core corporate values. They demonstrate that alignment in how they behave and how they show up. If being customer-centric is a core corporate value, define what that looks like. Being able to connect the dots of an employee’s behavior and daily work to the outcome will inspire them to strive for higher levels of performance.

  1. Train Right: Enablement

Today’s customer needs and demands are constantly changing and evolving. Employees must be ready with the skills and training to meet and exceed those customer expectations. How are you able to deliver the right help to a customer at the right time? Not only is it about the technology being able to detect, alert, and route; it’s about ensuring your employees are equipped with the opportunity and access to continually develop their talents. Ensure your learning and development initiatives are hyper-focused and personalized – both in content and delivery.

  1. Lead Right: Empowerment

A Gallup research on workforce engagement found that companies must have a 4-to-1 ratio of engaged employees to disengaged employees to counteract the negative impact from the disengaged group. A core factor to engaged employees is having leaders who empower them. Leadership that empowers their employees recognizes them for achievements and let’s each team member know they have their back.

As humans, we strive to do the right thing. When leadership gives the power to an employee to do that for their customers, they move the needle on not only an employee’s satisfaction but also on the customer’s experience.

Be Human In Design

Just like your customer experience practice needs to be designed, so does your employee experience. As you map your customer’s journey, overlay it with your employee’s journey. You’ll most likely find that there are critical moments of overlap. For example, a customer’s difficulty in doing business with your company can be correlated to employees being stuck in an internal operational process that’s delaying their ability to deliver a service to the customer. At the end of the day, regardless of technology, we work together with humans. Make sure that both your customer experience and employee experience practices keep the human at the center of everything you do.

Check out this infographic for more information on how to improve the employee experience, satisfy your customers and provide great customer experiences.