Blog van Paula Clapon op gethppy.com. Organizations with engaged employees have customers with a higher levels of customer satisfaction. Companies should look at creating an integrated employee experience that tracks a candidate from their first contact with the company brand, until their last day at the office and even further.
Aligning The Employee Experience To The Customer Experience Standard
As a term, customer-centricity became a trending expression when organizations started adopting customer relationship management, due to its frequent use by vendors of CRM software. Today, it encompasses both business processes and cultural mindsets, but also the actual way of doing things within a given company.
A customer-centric approach has been proven to add value to a company, as a cultural and branding element but also as a business differentiator. What it translates to is putting customers above everything else and at the heart of every decision.
But what about the customer within? What about one of the key resources that ensure a company’s competitive advantage over other businesses?
Not only is this a logical question every business should come to, but it also points to the strong relationship between customer satisfaction and employee engagement.
“At present you’ve got employee engagement on one side of the fence, and you’ve got customer experience on the other side of the fence. Both of those topics are being seen to be important to business. Both of these strategies are becoming common now. But I don’t see a lot of organisations pulling them together.”
Colin Shaw, founder of customer experience consultancy Beyond Philosophy via Mycustomer.com
Combining customer-centricity and employee-centricity is a smart strategy for a multitude of reasons. Here are some essential pointers identified in a study by Northwestern University – Linking Organizational Characteristics to Employee Attitudes and Behavior – A Look at the Downstream Effects on Market Response & Financial Performance:
- There is a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and improved financial performance.
- The key organizational characteristic for explaining employee satisfaction is organizational communication (a measure of the downward and upward communication in an organization).
- Employee satisfaction is a key antecedent to employee engagement. Interaction between managers and employees with regards to supportiveness and goal setting, as well as job design were also key drivers of employee engagement.
- Organizational culture was another significant driver of employee engagement, where employees must be expected to cooperate and work together, but also to take charge and provide a voice for the customer within the organization. A fully cooperative culture feels the need to reach consensus on a single option, where a culture promoting healthy competition provides multiple choices which are then balanced against one another in an attempt to develop an optimal solution.
[…]
Voor de rest van de punten en het artikel: klik hier
