Customer experience, the employee experience and their organizational culture are inextricably linked. That’s the conclusion of this article from Quirk’s Marketing Research Review. As examples, USAA, Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Apple and Zappos are cited as being tops in their customer experiences.  It’s likely that the CEOs of these companies are responsible for those rankings because they publicly put employees and organizational culture first.  Happy company, happy customers. Nunwood, a research company based in Leeds, United Kingdom, studied these top companies to determine some best practices in revamping the customer experience.

What Nunwood found is that leading companies approach their entire corporate culture systematically. They first identify roadblocks or inconsistencies in delivering outstanding customer experiences, look for processes that don’t work, identify rigid organizational structures, conflicting incentives and, finally, the unwritten rules of organizational behavior. Unwritten rules can govern the customer experience because they govern employee experiences. For example, if employees know they must do everything to keep the boss happy, they may stop short of making a customer happy.

If you’re intent on understanding your corporate culture, start by asking what you already know about your customer.  It might be more than you think.  But, does each part of your organization know what you know, and vice versa?  Once you fully understand your customers then ask how you can help your customers buy more.