Employee Experience is the New Customer Experience
Business’ priorities have shifted – your competitors are no longer focused solely on the customer experience. Instead, they’re creating exceptional employee experiences that keep the workforce engaged, productive, and profitable. And you can use cutting-edge technology to reap those same rewards, regardless of the size of your business.
You might think that focusing on the employee experience is beyond the scope of your resources. However, new, intelligent technologies are enabling businesses of all sizes to intelligently support an employee experience that empowers everyone, from full-time employees to external contractors, to achieve more.
Specifically, intelligent finance solutions can help you extend your existing technology and business processes to enhance your employee experience for maximum productivity and value.
More than just free lunch
If you were to ask your employees what aspects of their jobs they find frustrating, some answers are a given: mundane work, repetitive tasks, and inefficient processes. A better employee experience means improving the things that your workforce needs to get the job done – and minimising those parts that get in the way. And while free lunch and other office amenities can help create a better employee experience, they aren’t what makes or breaks the experience. Rather, employees find job fulfillment from the rewarding, value-adding aspects of their jobs.
By streamlining or removing repetitive, mundane, and unfulfilling aspects of their day to day, you can create a better employee experience that empowers your employees to get more done. This begins with the automation of simple, often tedious, employee tasks.
Even if you have already invested in some form of business automation, you can simply continue to extend those automated processes to include even more tasks that your employees would benefit from focusing on less. One easily automated area is finance.
New and extended automation in finance
Automation lends itself well to finance processes because intelligent technology can easily complete forms, interpret documents, and check for errors – often more accurately than humans. Not only do many finance processes consume significant amounts of your employees’ time, but they are also error-prone and costly. Embedding intelligence into finance processes, such as the completion and submission of an expense report, can catch errors early. This is especially useful for regulated areas of your finance processes that, when incorrect, could cost you big, be it from lost revenue or fines.
If you’ve already taken your first steps and automated some of your finance processes, you can extend these enhancements even further. For instance, modern finance solutions can process and interpret receipts and integrate with the apps and sites your workforce already likes to use, and then update employees about the best deals on travel as they plan their next business trip. You can also enhance the reach of automation in accounts payable and supplier invoice management. Not only can automation automatically capture, process, and pay invoices, but it can also catch duplicate supplier invoices to save you time and money.
Such solutions provide new benefits to finance leaders, too. Intelligent technology can gather accurate data from your finance solutions, so decision-makers can, for instance, identify safety risks for travelling employees. By making the right calls at the right time, intelligent finance technology keeps decision-makers informed and improves duty of care.
The benefits of a small-to-medium-sized intelligent enterprise
The best way to show your employees that you value their time is by giving some of it back to them. Your employees, in turn, will be empowered to spend that time on higher-value tasks that bring greater benefits to your company. In fact, according to the findings of a Gallup poll, an exceptional employee experience results in 17% higher productivity and 40% lower employee turnover. And some organisations have seen as much as three times greater revenue per employee.*
If your stakeholders are still dedicated to the customer experience and wary of focusing on anything new, they will be glad to know that the employee experience and customer experience go hand in hand. When employees are more satisfied and empowered to fulfill their jobs, it only makes sense that they’ll do a better job of meeting your customers’ needs. The technology improvements that you’ve provided for your employees, such as automation, can easily be extended to the customer to enhance their experience, too.
SAP Concur solutions are here to help finance leaders in small-to-midsize business improve their employee experience and reap the benefits of an empowered workforce. SAP Concur solutions embed intelligence into your finance processes so you can gain greater business insight, control, and savings.
Download the new whitepaper, “Employee Experience and the Bottom Line: 7 Reasons Why Employee Satisfaction Is Good for Small and Midsized Business” to learn more.
*“State of the Global Workplace,” Gallup, Inc., 2017.
