Your Employee Experience Is Your Customer Experience
I’ve spent over twenty years running customer-facing organizations — support, services, delivery. And I can tell you with complete certainty: your customers will never be treated better than your employees are.
This isn’t a motivational poster. It’s an operational reality I’ve watched play out across every organization I’ve led.
The signal your customers are already picking up
When I took over a global support organization, the employee Net Promoter Score was negative eleven. The team had been through a string of acquisitions, stitched together with no unified leadership, no shared identity, and no investment in the people doing the work. Managers didn’t talk to each other. Directors were adrift. Nobody felt connected to anything larger than their own silo.
And the customer experience? Exactly what you’d expect. Response times were inconsistent. Quality varied wildly depending on which legacy team handled your case. Escalations were high. Customer satisfaction scores were mediocre at best.
Here’s what nobody in the C-suite wanted to hear: the customer problem and the employee problem were the same problem. You can’t have a team that feels neglected and invisible and then expect them to make your customers feel valued and heard. That math doesn’t work.
What investment actually looks like
I didn’t fix the customer experience by implementing a new CRM or redesigning the support process — though we did both eventually. I fixed it by fixing the employee experience first.
In my first 30 days, I had roughly 250 one-on-one meetings. Every person in the org. I documented every piece of feedback and built a punch list. Then we started working through it — visibly, consistently, with progress updates in monthly all-hands meetings.
We stood up regular leadership syncs, gave managers actual decision-making authority, created career paths that didn’t exist before, and invested in training that went beyond onboarding checklists. We made people feel like the company gave a damn about them.
Within a year, eNPS went from -11 to over 50. Attrition dropped to under 3%. And the customer metrics followed — not because we launched some big customer experience initiative, but because the people serving those customers finally had the context, the tools, and the motivation to do it well.
The gap nobody talks about
Most companies have completely separate conversations about employee engagement and customer satisfaction. HR owns one. The business owns the other. The data lives in different systems, reported to different leaders, discussed in different meetings.
That’s insane. The people delivering your customer experience are your employee experience. Every decision you make about how you treat them — what you invest in, what you deprioritize, how you communicate during hard times — shows up in how they treat your customers. There’s no firewall between the two.
I’ve watched organizations spend millions on customer journey mapping and NPS programs while simultaneously cutting training budgets and ignoring manager development. Then they wonder why customer satisfaction isn’t improving. The answer is sitting in the break room, disengaged and looking at job postings.
The say/do ratio matters here too
What kills employee experience isn’t the absence of perks. It’s the gap between what the company says and what it does. Leadership says “people are our greatest asset” in the all-hands, then cuts headcount without explanation. Leadership says “we value work-life balance” while expecting weekend responses to emails. Leadership says “support is critical” while giving the support org the leftover budget every single year.
Your employees watch that gap. And they calibrate their own effort accordingly. If the company treats them like a cost center, they’ll behave like one. If the company treats them like they matter, they’ll act like it — and your customers will feel the difference.
The bottom line
I didn’t need a Harvard Business Review study to figure this out, though the data backs it up. I learned it the hard way, watching what happened when I inherited teams that had been neglected and then seeing what happened when we finally invested in them.
The businesses that deliver exceptional customer experiences aren’t the ones with the best technology or the cleverest processes. They’re the ones where the people doing the work feel respected, equipped, and connected to something worth caring about.
Fix the employee experience. The customer experience follows. Every time.
— Bruno