If you are a clinician, it’s more than likely that you are familiar with the family of X’s: Dx, Tx, and Mx. Today, I want to introduce you to Ex and Cx.

Ex and Cx are conjoined twins that have an intimate relationship by virtue of proximity and function. When Ex is having a bad day, Cx can’t help but notice the poor customer service and lack of care. When Ex is thriving and loving life, Cx gets VIP service with a smile.

You’ve probably worked out by now that Ex is Employee experience, and Cx is Customer experience. The Ex = Cx equation could just as easily be Cx(i) = Cx(e) (Internal customer experience = External customer experience). This is especially true for the healthcare industry, where the prime service experienced by the external customer (the consumer) is delivered directly by the internal customer (the healthcare worker). As the story above suggests, they might as well be conjoined twins as far as the organisation is concerned. You see, the way you treat your healthcare employee, will have an immediate flow on effect on your consumer.

What goes in, will come out. Invest in your employees, and you’ll see your returns come out through positive feedback from your patients. The Golden Rule was never more true about influencing others. If you want your consumers to be treated with respect, dignity, care and compassion, then you have to do the same with your employees. Empower your employees to thrive, and they will support your consumers to do the same – in aged care, we call this reablement. 

The good intentions of promoting self-sacrifice in the name of true altruism – “do it because you care, not because of the money” – has unfortunately led to the ‘doormat’-ing and de-valuing of ‘lowly nurses’. It’s time we took stock of how we treat our nursing colleagues and recognised the Ex = Cx equation. 

At Nurse Generation, this is the reason we have a Chief Experience Officer – to constantly hold the Ex and Cx in tandem, so much so that our employee-nurses are actually termed our customers, and our external customers are termed our clients.

In service to our customers both internal and external,

Qing
Chief Experience Officer

“Treat the patient as a whole, not just the hole in the patient.” – unknown