October 29, 2025

Wellness Is the New CX Strategy

By Rachel Lutz Guevara

Great customer experience depends on frontline workers being adaptable, resilient, and empathic.

This assertion isn’t just a hunch or a common-sense assumption. It’s backed up by data. And it’s why I say wellness is the new CX strategy.

Let’s start with the data.

Employee Well-Being Matters

A string of tightly linked events begins with an employee who feels calm, present, and focused on the job.

Studies show a correlation between employee well-being and engaged employees. Engaged employees, in turn, are more productive, less likely to be absent, less likely to burn out, and much more satisfied. This shows up clearly in business metrics. In one study, findings showed:

• On average, enhanced psychological wellness corresponded to up to 281% improvement in work metrics.
• Being able to cope with unwanted thoughts, emotions, and stressful situations correlated with a 79% reduction in unplanned leave, while low burnout correlated with a 281% reduction.
• Low burnout was also associated with 69% better job performance and 96% higher retention intention.
• The pleasure derived from helping others correlated with a 117% increase in employee satisfaction, whereas low perceived stress was linked to a 30% increase.

Keeping your people psychologically healthy makes ethical sense–it’s the right thing to do, and is a sign of a strong corporate culture. But in addition, it’s good for a company’s customers. It makes good business sense.

Numerous studies have established a strong correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Some have even found a correlation with increased revenue. In fact, one study found that employers that support mental health see a return of $4 for every dollar invested in mental health treatment.

And a Gallup study found 10% higher customer loyalty with companies that had highly engaged employees.

It’s the employees who interact with customers that bring well-designed customer experiences to life, enhancing a company’s brand. That’s why it’s so important to do the right thing for employees: create an environment where they feel less stress, enjoy a healthy work-life balance, and don’t feel overwhelmed by dealing with customers who may at times be very demanding.

So how do you do that?

Wellness as a Strategy: It Starts with Culture

Wellness means much more than appointing a “wellness room” with reclining massage chairs and yoga mats. Instead of a few ad hoc attempts, it should be a business strategy that pervades the thinking of the company so that it can be seen—and felt—in the company’s culture, its way of doing things.

Culture can be challenging because, unlike a strategy you can draft, culture doesn’t exist by edict. It must be cultivated, influenced, and above all, contributed to by everyone. Employees cannot just read about it or hear presentations touting its importance. They should be able to sense it as a palpable reality that permeates their daily work experience.

I’ve found that regularity is a good way to keep nudging the culture in the right direction. Weekly wellness sessions for frontline employees led by trained clinicians help employees develop essential skills, such as self-compassion, adaptability, and the ability to regulate one’s own emotions. These are not interventions when something has gone wrong. They are intentional forums that prepare employees for what inevitably lies ahead.

In fact, when this thinking is embedded in strategy, it influences how a company matches newly hired employees to roles that will best suit them. By screening for traits like grit and emotional regulation, you can place people where they will be most likely to thrive.

Other things I’ve found helpful in creating a culture of wellness:

• Staff a lead wellness team with mental health professionals, coaches, and clinicians who can be effective at arming customer experience agents with the mental health tools they need to succeed, and who can help when an employee feels pushed to the limit.
• Maintain round-the-clock access to wellness services, including online training, workshops, meditation support, and, yes, even yoga.
• Invest in wellness tech. In our company, we’ve found meditation headsets, biofeedback equipment, virtual reality systems, and similar tools to be very useful.
• Develop a network of wellness advocates–we call them “Wellness Heros”–throughout the organization, helping employees to see that it’s not just a priority for a few leaders with “wellness” in their titles, but something that the company has embraced as a way of working.
• Find appropriate connections between a wellness strategy and your company’s purpose and values. One of our values is “Work Hard, Have Fun.” It lends itself quite well to an environment that promotes wellness.

Customer experiences that delight depend on engaged, adaptable, resilient, and empathetic employees to deliver and support them. Wellness as a strategy isn’t a trend or an option. It’s the heart of great customer experience.

Whenever I buy something, return something, ask for assistance finding something, and really enjoy the interaction, not only do I think better of the company, I also think, “wow—they must be taking great care of their people.”

About the author

Rachel Guevara is a licensed mental health professional and Division Vice President of Trust & Safety (T&S) at TaskUs. She oversees global T&S operations, client satisfaction, and technology innovation, prioritizing psychological health and safety. Rachel manages a team of 200 employees across 12 countries and has driven $275M in annual revenue, a 36% growth in T&S revenue, and reduced attrition by 50%.