June 10, 2026
Culture is the Glue Between CX and EX: Three Ways to Make It Stick
We are all familiar with the impact that customer experience (CX) has on commercial success. We know too that the employee experience (EX) is a key lever of CX. What is often missed is that an organisation’s culture is the glue that joins them together – focus on this and the ROI from CX and EX starts to flow.
Why the false separation between CX and EX?
Organisations often treat CX and EX as separate endeavours, with different teams analysing data, designing ‘what good looks like’ frameworks and initiating change programmes in isolation. Working with clients across many sectors and stages of growth, we find the most common reasons for this are:
Different owners
Typically the Director of Sales and Operations or similar owns the CX. Meanwhile, the Director of HR or People owns the EX. Most organisations are culturally siloed so the separation starts from the top and ripples through the way teams work day-to-day.
Different measures
Whilst many of the measures of CX and EX success are similar (Net Promoter Score; attraction; retention; advocacy), organisations rarely analyse the data holistically.
Questions connecting the two are not asked, such as:
- What impact is high absence having on our customer experience?
- What impact is a high number of product complaints having on our employee experience?
Different priorities
‘Customer first’ is a value in many organisations. It suggests that designing the CX first, then working back to EX, is the right approach. However, it’s commonly understood that a ‘People First’ culture leads to a better experience for customers. A ‘Happy people = Happy customers’ philosophy.
Neither assumption is good enough. If ‘happy people’ means only working the hours that suit employees, from a location that works for them, this may not work for customers. Equally, assuming that ‘the customer is always right’ can lead to frontline teams feeling undermined and overwhelmed.
These all have culture at their heart – siloed thinking, fractured ways of working, power dynamics, old ways of thinking. When culture is working, the CX–EX picture is designed, implemented and measured in the round, with curiosity, challenge and collaboration.
What Are the Warning Signs of a Poor CX–EX Culture?
When the culture consultancy I work for, Pecan, is asked to run a culture review there are a few familiar red flags that indicate the cultural glue is not working.
Multiple frameworks
Over the first couple of weeks, we are sent more and more frameworks. These are typically designed by different people in the organisation at different points in time. One for CX, one for EX, a set of values, a competency framework, and often others that overlap or complicate what’s needed.
Outstanding CX or EX scores
When surveys are the only source of insight they can be misleading.
Outstanding NPS scores can disguise long working hours and high absence or turnover levels in certain teams. This means good CX is unlikely to be sustainable.
On the otherhand, outstanding engagement scores could mean CX is not given sufficient priority. Teams may not be held to account for high enough standards of customer care.
Where CX and EX Conversations Break Down
It’s common to observe leadership meetings with a Customer First value without hearing the customer mentioned once.
HR teams are unaware of changes in the market and the implications for customers’ needs so the people requirements are not designed into the EX.
Equally, CX professionals sit in operational team meetings where no consideration is given to what it really takes to keep a team engaged and motivated, wanting to perform at their best over the long-term.
How to Strengthen the Culture Connecting CX and EX
Ultimately, the customer and employee experiences need to be designed together, making sure that each one feeds the other and that the culture enables the delivery of both.
Teams accountable for their implementation need to understand the whole picture, how they impact each other and the business outcomes that are needed from the interplay between the two.
Total Experience: The Next Stage
In KPMG’s latest Global Customer Experience Excellence report they explore the concept of designing the Total Experience and how the ability to do this has been accelerated by agentic AI. “The goal is no longer just to serve the customer well in a single interaction, but to connect every person, process, and digital interaction around a consistent, coherent, and human-centred experience.”
Total experience is the next stage of the experience revolution. It requires a culture where every decision is anchored in a deep understanding of customer needs and context. It means using data not as a by-product, but to anticipate and personalise service in every interaction.
Silos must be broken down to deliver this kind of seamless integration across channels and employees must feel empowered to act as “experience-makers”. The approach puts human empathy at the heart of the relationship with customers, whilst digitisation enables scale.
Richer Sounds has been high up in KPMG’s customer experience excellence rankings for many years and is still improving its scores. By continually working on high customer satisfaction and a deep focus on their employee experience they consistently take market share from larger competitors in the electronics sector. They have always maintained high levels of engagement and advocacy (nearly 90% of employees on Glassdoor would recommend them to a friend as a place to work) and in 2019 founder Julian Richer transferred the majority stake into an Employee Ownership Trust.
The organisation has built their operating model around deep understanding of local communities, empowering store teams to adapt offers and experiences to regional needs.
Three Ways to Strengthen Your CX–EX Culture
Here are three starting points to check if your cultural glue needs work:
1. Total Experience walks
Buddy up people from sales, service and HR – go and experience your organisation from the customers’ perspectives and from frontline teams’ perspectives. Debrief together – What’s working? What’s not? What are the underlying causes of this? What can we do about this?
2. Run a mini culture audit
Include some culture questions in your employee engagement survey then run a few focus groups to dig into the key themes. Find out what it’s really like to work here – What behaviours are valued? What behaviours are unhelpful? What’s tolerated that shouldn’t be? How is our culture impacting our CX and business outcomes?
3. Invest in middle managers
Leadership development is often the privilege of senior leaders. Anyone leading people needs to understand the customer’s world (that includes teams in HR, Finance, Risk etc). They need a mindset that is ruthlessly focused on enabling frontline teams to deliver CX successfully. This includes: staying curious, finding out from teams and each other what is needed, unblocking friction in the system, getting teams collaborating together, sharing resources and driving progress.
Richer Sounds demonstrates that even in a high technology organisation, customers still value human-to-human relationships. Culture is the glue that enables employees to deliver this.
Ella Overshott is Director of Pecan Partnership. She has over 30 years’ experience in culture change, engagement and performance improvement. Ella’s experience reflects her love of change and variety working across many sectors including financial services, higher education, retail, utilities and social enterprise across the UK, latterly achieving award winning success for her work in mergers and acquisitions.
Her background leading sales and operations teams brings practicality and commercial focus to the challenge of culture change and people engagement. Ella is passionate about the link between customer experience, culture and business performance, ‘joining the dots’ that connect people on the inside of an organisation to their customers on the outside.
