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Employees Are Customers Too
In "Are You Modeling Customer-Centric Behavior" I wrote about one of the key messages I glean from my conversations with three of our 1to1 Customer Champions -- Kevin Cantwell, president of Big River Telephone; Kelly Lam, manager of marketing services for BMW Canada; and Brynn Palmer, director of the customer experience for Charter Communications -- when we met to tape our next Champions webcast (watch for it in September!). That message was the importance of executives modeling customer-centric behavior to create a customer-focused culture.
Another must is an employee focus. All three Champions continually stressed how crucial it is to treat employees with the same respect and value as customers to achieve long-term business success, as well as to create a customer-centric culture that enables that success. They all expressed the importance of treating customer service representatives as businesspeople who help customers to resolve issues and to make important buying decisions. And they all noted the powerful impact of empowering front-line staff with the information they need when they need it and the training and support to make what they think is the best decision for the customer while understanding the business impact of those decisions.
This approach is delivering growth for all three organizations. What's your employee-engagement strategy?
Having made the decision to 'look after' their employees and 'treat them well', many companies forget to define 'good treatment'. Indeed, what makes employees happy, resulting in happy customers?
Too often management imagines they 'know what employees want' -- and earnestly invest in providing it. They raise salaries, offer generous bonuses, build state-of-the-art canteens and bring in (from an already thriving specialist 'industry') myriad benefits.
I am not sure how happy employees become as a result; my impression is they take it for granted. What I am sure about (from solid research evidence) is what makes employees unhappy:
- Salary and benefits rarely make it to the top 3 reasons for dissatisfaction and employee attrition(!) and are never no.1 among reasons.
- Another factor always gets into the top 3 and is often the no.1 reason for employees to seek a new job. The 'winner' is...
"They don't listen to me!"
Employees have problems, suggestions of improvement, or just opinions. Listening doesn't cost much -- yet companies keep pumping money into 'bribing' employees with remuneration and perks, paying only lip service to feedback and staff empowerment.
They run regular 'employee satisfaction surveys' and report imporvements year on year. Yet disaffected employees continue to leave or, if trapped by a job situation, to pour their anger on customers.
Companies even conduct 'employee loyalty' research and report reduced turnover. Little surprise: the 'loyal' employee, well 'primed' with bonuses and perks, will not leave -- but will continue to spend their time playing Battleships on the PC or browsing the Net for adult sites. A very satisfied employee, indeed.
Metrics like satisfaction or loyalty (based on tenure) can be misleading and even damaging. Proper measurement of engagement and motivation is yet to find wide adoption.
But we should at least start thinking about it. What motivates your employees?
Yes, here I come again with my cynical remarks. However, in a left handed sort of way this is a compliment.
Treating employees as customers is not only seen as a proper thing to do, it is THE most important aspect of achieving quality service in any organization. It has only been 11 years since the Harvard Business School first published Hackett's (et.al.) book entitled The Service-Profit-Chain. The premise is logically established that not only will focusing on "internal service quality" (i.e. all aspects of the employee) increase quality service, it will have a dramatically positive effect on profits.
One might additionally point out that soon after opening his root beer stand in 1927, Mr. J.W. Marriott was quoted as saying "take good care of your employees and they will take good care of your customers." Although not statistically correlated, it can be argued that Marriott is one of the largest and most profitable hotel organizations in the world, and not surprisingly, is continually rated as one of the best employers for which to work.
Keep up the good work, and keep focusing on the employee!