|
|
Connecting customer expectations and employee behaviour
|
|
Over the years the role of managers responsible for people management has evolved from drafting policies, ensuring compliance and playing a balancing act between management and employee unions to that of recruiting, development and retaining best of the talent available. Understandably during the initial stages of people management, the focus was on maintaining harmonious industrial relations and building confidence in the people. However, in the period that followed development of people took the centre stage but HR is still inward focused – number of positions, capabilities needed to run the show, motivation for ensuring initiation and so on for improving productivity and profitability.
|
Paradigm shift in HR focus
Today when competition between firms has also permeated the sphere of human capabilities and effectiveness of any activity is being measured by the value it creates for the stakeholders; it is a competitive necessity that as HR manager, you have a close re-look at your activities with respect to the value that you create for all important stakeholder of the business – the customer.
Long term customer loyalty is a function of consistently enhanced experiences of customers with organization’s systems and people. Customer experience is often enriched by the
- relevance, accuracy and timeliness of information passed on to them,
- responsiveness to their concerns,
- and consistency in attention, care and personalization in customer interaction.
|
|
|
Perception of customers on account of these aspects is driven by the employee behaviour rather than the systems, procedures and technology, which are undoubtedly important but are limited in effectiveness by the extent to which people in the organization value customer results.
And here lies the role of HR in shaping employee behaviours in such a way that it becomes a differentiating factor at the market place. This kind of differentiation rooted deeply in the human capital is bound to be a competitive advantage for the firm. This way HR can contribute to the profitability by improved customer loyalty. But to do so, HR managers must have basic knowledge of customers like their use of firm’s products and services, their perceived value of the firm’s products and services, competitors offering and so on.
Customer awareness
To match employee behaviour with customer expectations, HR managers must first gain customer literacy – knowledge of targeted customers & customer segments. Key customers that contribute most to firm’s revenue, their buying behaviour, their value proposition – perceived strengths in the firm that results in repeat purchases are some of the issues. Also HR must know why some of the major players in the targeted segments buy from the competitors.
This will help HR in designing systems and promoting a culture which ensures that targeted customers have their experience enhanced every time. This way HR can have a positive impact on the market share and profitability. This can by no means be done by HR alone, however knowledgeable they might be in customer related issues. It definitely is a collaborative work with marketing executives.
Creating awareness bout customers is a collaborative effort
Collaborative effort with marketing executives can start from understanding trends in customer satisfaction and market share data. HR and marketing can start clarifying the trends and emerging signals from such measurements to the key people along the value chain. HR must facilitate debate on what changes in the existing systems can enhance customer’s experience with the firm and put sincere efforts at getting the same implemented by the concerned department or process. This takes us to the challenge of aligning HR practices and customer satisfaction or in other words aligning employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
Aligning employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction
Communicating the message coming out of customer satisfaction measurement is only half the job done. Aligning HR practices such as performance management, advancement, rewards and recognition and training & development with customers and their value proposition is a real challenge for HR professional. When done well customer values will permeate all walks of organizational life and genuine efforts to enhance customer experience can be seen all around.
This is one way by which HR can help create customer experiences that will build long term customer loyalty and add enduring value for the organization.
|
|
|
