As this absolutely crazy year winds down, it’s time to ask the question “what great things has 2020 brought to your business?” You didn’t expect that one, did you?! We think one standout opportunity is aligning your core corporate values with your employee experience and your customer experience.

The CX silver lining of 2020 is that it has caused companies to listen harder because customer behaviors, needs, and expectations have changed dramatically. Many of us are also looking inward at our businesses and employees (and our personal lives), to make sure we’re sitting on a strongly connected foundation of values and action to get us through whatever the future holds. 

Experience built on a values foundation

What values do you hold as your company’s North Star? These will mold your customers’ experiences with your brand and differentiate you from your competitors. If you haven’t spent time examining your company’s core beliefs in general, or reexamining them this year, now’s the time to do it.

Yes, it’s an internal view, but don’t mistake it for navel-gazing. This is a big-picture exercise examining your company values, the people you hire, the products and services you create, and the way you conduct business every single day. While we at Wootric are hyper-focused on customer experience, we’re well aware that there is a strong tie between the experience on the inside (values, employees) and the CX we’re providing to the outside world. 

That may all seem like great theory, but does it work in practice? Let’s run it through a real-world company — Wootric.

Find inspiration

Wootric CEO Deepa Subramanian reflected on re-making time for company values some years ago. When starting Wootric, she reflected on specific brands she appreciated based on their values.

• Zappos’ love of WOWing their customers
• Quora for their focus on knowledge
• Buffer because they are radical about transparency
• Asana which created a culture of fearlessness
• Clorox for creating a collaborative and diverse workforce
• Salesforce for its strong charitable foundation
• Morrison & Foerster for dedication to pro bono work

These brands didn’t just pay lip-service to their key values, they built a corporate culture around them and used those values to impact the world.

Choose themes to infiltrate every part of your company

Wootric has 5 values we imbue in our products, and every experience we create for our employees, our customers, and their customers. These values have driven our culture and priorities, and grown Wootric from a simple in-app survey tool to an AI-powered CX management platform that integrates with the modern tech stack. And through all that growth, our positive net promoter score (NPS) has never wavered. They’re not just a nice-to-have, these values are part of our company’s DNA.

Listen, Learn, Improve

As a company, we hire smart, curious people, and then we listen to their ideas and make sure we’re constantly improving their work experiences and our customers’ experiences. We’ve built a product that is absolutely focused on this concept, automating NPS, CSAT, and CES measurement inside applications and experiences throughout the customer journey. Our platform not only listens, it lets companies follow up with customers and use their feedback to improve products and deliver new products that serve current and future customer needs. 

“While our product helps our customers delight their users through listening-learning-and-improving, our company mission is to enable that, and in doing so delight ours.  This is the why of Wootric.” 

– Deepa Subramanian, CEO Wootric

Areté

At Wootric it matters that we hire interesting people with far-flung life experiences and passions inside and outside their job. Arete is Greek for the act of living up to one’s full potential. We focus on people first which lets us pull everyone together to make a singular, really cool unified group of talents. Our co-founders are from SoCal and Bangalore (with close ties to San Francisco), who speak a variety of languages and find fulfillment in jazz singing, eastern spirituality, and western legal traditions. Across this company, we have artists, data lovers, and hardcore engineering geeks. By respecting and nurturing talents, our employees get to live up to their full potential outside and inside Wootric. 

Trust, and be free

We trust each other and ourselves, and we share conviction in new ideas and our product. That lets us have the freedom that we absolutely value. Because we trust each other, we don’t micromanage so employees can garden at noon and send in new designs at 3AM – so long as work gets done when it’s needed. We’re in this because we trust in our idea, product, and team. This makes us both optimistic and resilient.

Failure is feedback

Not surprising for a company focused on customer feedback and CX, Wootric is all about feedback. And some of the best feedback we get is from failure. I don’t know about you, but some of the biggest learning experiences I’ve had started as a failure, and those “failures” taught me what I needed to succeed. Without venturing into the unknown expecting to fail, learn, and try again, we wind up without any great leaps forward. And so we embrace failure as a core value. Employees have the freedom to innovate, to test that new idea. For every failure, there is learning and advancement that we can put into our product and our CX.

 “Failing is a core value at Wootric because the risks of working at a startup are ultimately only outweighed by the learnings. And failure is the quickest way to learn.”

– Deepa Subramanian, CEO Wootric

śavāsana

And breathe! The final relaxation of yoga practice — savasana — is a huge inspiration for us insisting our employees take the breaks needed to rest and rejuvenate mind, body, and spirit. We absolutely believe in fun, which of course connects to living up to our full potential. It’s also important to all of us that we allocate time and energy to the service of others. This holistic view lets us serve ourselves and our community, and take the rest we need so we don’t burn out and lose sight of our other core values that let us build our strong employee and customer experiences.

Employee experience fuels customer experience

Strong well-chosen values will align everyone at your company behind the same goal. Employees are people who want to be connected to a purpose, not a paycheck. So create a purpose-driven organization and make that purpose the customer. 

Our core values filter into every single thing Wootric does. The values were created holistically, to take employees and customers into consideration, and to honor the connection between employee experience and customer experience. Enthusiastic, inspired employees envision and create world-altering products and experiences for customers. 

By being employee-centric, companies are able to retain their best workers who are inspired to their best work and recognized for it. And when you point all those employees to the goal of providing an amazing customer experience, that’s exactly what you’ll get. According to Bain engaged employees deliver 2.5x the revenue for their companies. 

We know our 5 core values have worked for us. We’ve been here for 7 years and zero employees have quit! And thanks to our dedicated team, we now serve 1,200 brands worldwide. The foundation of core company values that we flow into our EX and CX has made all that possible.

What values are important to your company and how will you use them to power the experiences you create?