Building loyalty among a company's teams is just as important as building loyalty among its customers. To ensure this, it is essential for a company to value its employees, applying a form of symmetry between the attention paid to customers and employees.
The customer experience is at the heart of every brand's concerns, but for a company, building employee loyalty is also a major issue, and one that requires special attention to be paid to the employee experience. Companies are therefore stepping up their inventiveness to put in place innovative and attractive solutions.
For Jean-Jacques Gressier, CEO of the Service Academy, this rhetoric is called "symmetry of attention". This is based on three principles: customer culture, management culture and employee culture. If a company needs to know what its customers expect, it must also know what its employees expect.
At American Express, exemplary customer service begins with the high standards the company sets itself for the treatment of its employees. To achieve this, the work of the CX teams is highlighted. At the plenary meetings of the historic company's senior management, some of the employees are invited to present their work and achievements.
Valuing employees through employee share ownership
Visiativ, an integrator and publisher of collaborative software solutions for SMEs, has set up an employee share ownership scheme as a way of showing that it values its employees. According to Grégory Jourdan, the company's Chief Human Resources & CSR Officer: "This scheme, which met with great success last year, is based on the notion of sharing in the company's value and the progress made jointly by all Visiativ employees. All employees who are members of the employee savings plan in France are eligible. It is part of Originall, which helps to define the DNA of our company. It also includes our annual employee satisfaction survey".
In response to this initiative, Visiativ employees are demonstrating a long-term commitment: "Last year, more than one employee in two decided to become a Visiativ shareholder via the Fonds commun de placement entreprise (FCPE)," explains Grégory Jourdan. This year, the trend is continuing, with just over 51% of the company's employees holding shares in the company. At present, employee shareholders own 1.97% of the capital."
Offering innovative solutions
In terms of customer experience, companies have understood the value of technologies such as AI or Web 3. But some are pushing this logic as far as their employees. This is the case of Coty, the cosmetics giant that oversees the beauty activities of Gucci, Burberry and Chloé. The group has announced the forthcoming deployment of a metaverse for its teams.
The aim of this virtual world is to strengthen communication between employees and unite teams spread across the globe. To achieve this, Coty is working with Spatial, a company specialising in the design of 3D platforms and experiences. The company is building an internal platform called Coty Campus, entirely dedicated to the company's activities. It is due to be launched in autumn 2023. This metaverse aims to offer a range of immersive experiences and interactive solutions to "encourage collaboration and co-creation", says Jean-Denis Mariani, chief digital officer at Coty, who says he wants to make the group "a digital leader".
In concrete terms, Coty Campus will be a social platform accessible on computer and mobile. It will feature customisable avatars through which employees can navigate the interface and communicate in the form of text and voice chat. This metaverse should also include functions such as screen sharing and document and file sharing. The aim of all these tools is to keep teams better informed, while making it easier for them to learn new skills.