Employees as customers: unlocking the power of internal customer experience

Employees are not merely the drivers of customer experience – they can also be customers themselves.

When we hear the word "customer", our minds often leap to external buyers. After all, that is often a mould we find ourselves in – dining in restaurants, shopping for products, or seeking customer support. Yet, a critical group of customers often goes overlooked: employees. These individuals not only drive customer experience, but are also customers themselves, relying on internal systems, processes, and resources to perform their roles effectively.

Culture-centric organisations recognise that a positive customer experience starts internally, but this can be amplified by placing focus on Internal Customer Experience (ICX). You might be thinking, "isn't this just employee experience?" and to some extent yes, but the key difference here is that employee experience focuses on engagement and culture, but internal customer experience centres on shaping a more service-oriented approach to internal interactions.

Many organisations neglect the internal experience of their workers, but this is – in turn – to limit their success.

Nurturing a strong ICX garners more efficient processes, better internal working relationships, and it improves communication and collaboration. In fact, higher levels of satisfaction in the workplace have been found to increase productivity by up to 12%. ^[1] This has a positive ripple effect across the business and, vitally, these benefits transcend the organisation, making their way to external customers, building a better brand.

A Chain Reaction: How ICX Impacts CX

Consider an example mentioned above  - the experience of dining in a restaurant. You, the customer, are sitting at your table awaiting your meal. If the kitchen is staffed with happy, skilled chefs (internal teams) with the correct ingredients, recipes, and tools at their disposal, they can perform at their best. They will, in turn, confidently provide a meal to the servers (customer-facing teams), who then present you with a well-crafted, high-quality dish promptly and professionally.

The process behind the seamless dining experience detailed above begins far before the food reaches your plate. The process begins with the restaurant manager prioritising the kitchen facilities, alongside experience and skill of the chefs, which benefits the internal teams, before cascading to external customers. This chain reaction highlights the importance of ICX in ensuring a high-quality external customer experience (CX) and applies to virtually any industry or workplace.

Our experience working with a FTSE 100 energy company to launch and embed a new demonstrates how ICX can transform business outcomes. By prioritising employee journeys, adopting an employee-first mentality, and fostering a culture of internal service, we empowered employees to thrive and contribute to the company’s wider strategic goals.

1. Prioritising the Employee Journey

From the moment employees join a company, they should feel valued, supported, and prepared to excel in their roles. Much like the customer journey, the employee journey comprises critical touchpoints that must be optimised to allow employees to thrive and, in turn, for your team to succeed.

Providing Resources and Support

Ensuring employees have the resources they need to be successful in their role is a cornerstone of ICX. Ultimately, making your team members’ roles easy to navigate will enable them to perform at their best, allowing them to add value to your team from their very first day.

While launching the Multi-Cloud Platform, we strove to provide exceptional support materials so that anything our team might need would be at their fingertips. We designed a comprehensive support repository for the new Multi-Cloud Platform, making it easily accessible to all users. This repository included:

• Role-specific guides, nsibilities and thrive in their roles.
• Access to a hands-on training environment where employees could benefit from practical learning and track their progress.
• Interactive material, such as video tutorials, FAQs, and detailed documentation, to help employees navigate the platform independently.

This was made available to all users, and all new joiners, as support should be highlighted to workers as early as possible. Research shows that personalised, role-specific onboarding boosts new hire productivity by 70% and drives employee retention. ^[2]

These tools equipped employees to use the platform confidently and efficiently. A well-supported workforce naturally becomes more self-sufficient, efficient, collaborative, and happy. Naturally, this creates a powerful, positive domino effect that extends to the customers they serve, whether internally or externally.

2. Adopting an Employee-First Mentality

Committing to an employee first mentality will drive ICX forward, powering service-focused behaviours that improve efficiency and strengthen organisational trust. Through empowering employees to voice concerns and suggestions, in doing this you ensure that the business can respond to issues proactively and evolve at pace.

Listening and Acting on Feedback

An employee-first mentality is grounded in continuous communication and meaningful action. While rolling out the Multi-Cloud Platform, open feedback loops were essential in building a connected, engaged culture, via:

• Feedback forums, such as all-hands calls and champions networks, where employees at all levels could contribute ideas, raise concerns, and flag roadblocks. Their input directly shaped our strategy and the product itself.
• Hackathons, which gathered creative solutions, familiarised employees with their new tools, and sparked collaboration across teams for innovative uses of Cloud.
• In-person Cloud Expos, where employees attended hands-on demonstrations, insightful talks, and networking opportunities with peers and leadership.

These initiatives made employees feel heard, valued, and integral to the platform’s success. By listening to their needs and acting on their suggestions, we watched as morale and enthusiasm soared. This created higher adoption rates of the Cloud, more user engagement with our vendors, subsequent higher use of our vendor-provided security tooling, and therefore security incidents were prevented as a direct result of increased enthusiasm. Significantly, 84% of attendees reported that the in-person collaboration cultivated a cohesive team environment. This showed us how listening to, and acting on, feedback from internal teams benefits the teams themselves, as well as the wider business.

3. Building a Culture of Internal Service

Sustainable ICX requires embedding internal service principles into the organisation’s culture. Just as external customer experience is woven into strategies, the internal experience must be prioritised to garner lasting benefits.

Evolving with Employee Needs

At the energy company, we didn’t stop at launching the Multi-Cloud Platform—we made its success an ongoing process via continuing to invest in employees. This is because employees were viewed as customers whose experience should be optimised. This meant designing and updating support systems based on employee feedback. Our efforts included:

• Regularly refining training materials and introducing new resources.
• Adjusting the support model to address evolving needs and ensure accountability.
• Hosting in-person events to keep employees engaged, informed, and connected.

By creating a culture of internal service, we ensured employees remained supported as they gained confidence with the platform. This proactive approach aligned internal output with employee expectations, fostering ownership and trust among the workforce.

When internal service is prioritised, organisations benefit from cohesive teams, higher productivity, and a ripple effect of positive outcomes for external customers.

The Takeaway: Treat Employees Like Customers

Just as organisations invest in understanding and enhancing external customer journeys, they must adopt a similar approach internally. When employees are treated as customers, their satisfaction, engagement, and productivity flourish—benefiting the organisation as a whole.

By prioritising the employee journey, embracing an employee-first mentality, and embedding a culture of internal service, businesses can achieve transformative results. And as the energy company’s success demonstrates, these principles are not just theoretical; they deliver real, measurable impact.

Investing in ICX isn’t just about supporting employees—it’s about creating a thriving ecosystem where every interaction, internal and external, contributes to lasting success.