The Colleague Experience

Solid Foundations

We’ve written a lot about why it’s essential for any business to deliver excellent customer experiences - if you don’t they’ll churn, your reputation will suffer, you’ll lose money, and so forth. That’s all extremely important, but it doesn’t capture the full breadth of how important it is to have a solid foundation to work on when delivering those experiences, that foundation being a confident, knowledgeable, efficient, and contented customer facing workforce. It stands to reason, then, that the cornerstone of this foundation is an excellent colleague experience. 

A colleague experience is exactly what it sounds like - the day-to-day experiences of colleagues working together at some company, and everything that entails. Setting goals, overcoming obstacles, working with one another, using specific tools, and interacting with clients and customers all fall under the colleague experience umbrella. That last part is essential to note though, especially for customer-facing teams, like support, operations, and implementations teams. The colleagues working on those teams require and deserve as much support as possible, because a brand’s reputation is built in the interactions they have (no offense to marketing).

It matters. It really does.

It should go without saying (but unfortunately often doesn’t) that customer-facing colleagues need to feel empowered, supported, and given the opportunity and tools to succeed. Without these vital components, a positive colleague experience is impossible. With a negative colleague experience, team members will feel stressed out, unappreciated, and the quality of their work will suffer, all of which will end up being reflected in customer reviews. It will also be reflected in that organization’s ability to retain their talent, and ultimately, in their bottom line. 

Business considerations aside, any organization that is worth its salt when discussing the importance of company culture should already know all of this. Happy, confident colleagues aren’t only an asset to the company because of how efficient they are - they contribute to a positive working environment for everyone they interact with. Positive colleague experiences allow everyone at the company to have a sense of shared purpose and mission, and contribute to the overall well-being and success of their fellow colleagues and departments.

Our Colleague Experience

We’re in a position to write about this because, as we’ve always sought to deliver excellent customer experiences, we quickly learned that the ability to do so is entirely predicated on having empowered teams and colleagues. Having started off as a distributed services company, prioritizing an excellent colleague experience was at the forefront of our minds when developing our software platform. We wanted to take the slog and the struggle out of servicing customers and clients that are operating in complex, highly distributed tech environments (especially regarding anything having to do with merchant processing). 

In developing our product with the colleague experience in mind, we made sure that it was robust and powerful enough to leverage AI to help colleagues answer complex questions contextually, but also easy to understand and use. This is what allowed us to empower our own support and operations teams to work efficiently and confidently, so that they can deliver excellent customer experiences. We’re bringing it to market so that other enterprises - banks, fintechs, tech orgs, food and beverage companies, healthcare tech companies, and others can do the same.