Organisations that fail to embrace customer experience with HR processes such as hiring, training, rewards, and recognition, miss the opportunity promote an environment that facilitates employee customer experience success. While it may seem somewhat counterintuitive, the fact remains any organisation that wishes to offer a great customer experience needs to focus on its employees before its customers. When employees are engaged, they prove to be valuable assets, and lead a virtuous cycle which promotes great customer experiences. It also generates more loyal customers with stronger financial results. Around 75% of employees employed at companies with strong customer experience are highly or moderately engaged, compared to only 49% of employees at companies whose customer experience was relatively worse.
Despite the above figures which show more than 70% of companies are committed to producing significant employee engagement, HR ironically does not seem to completely embrace their role regarding employee engagement efforts or customer experience. When the HR function of an organisation is closely involved with customer experience efforts along with employee engagement, the organisation is likely to deliver a customer experience that is significantly much better than average in the industry.
If an organisation wishes to offer a great customer experience, then employee engagement is mandatory. Research conducted by Temkin Group with 300 HR professionals discovered the following significant facts which prove that the involvement of the HR helps an organisation to become much more customer-centric.
- Times are certainly changing, and in the present business scenario, customer centricity is gaining more attention. The HR professionals highlight the fact that there is a marked increase in the belief that organizations need to be more customer-centric. Research shows that over the past four years the percentage of HR professionals who are helping their organisations become more customer-centric has grown to 30%.
- Around six out of 10 HR professional areof the opinion they are closely involved in their organisation’s customer experience efforts. They are leading by adjusting hiring and recruiting practices. Regarding the HR and the Customer Experience teams working collaboratively, they were of the opinion that they have been quite successful in incorporating customer experience into the training and on-boarding process. They also developed a reward and recognition program to reinforce good customer-centric behaviors amongst the employees.
- The research also demonstrates that one of the major obstacles HR faces while helping their respective organisations become customer centric was the lack of time & resources.
Ways in Which the HR and Customer Experience Can Work Collaboratively
There are multiple opportunities for the HR and Customer Experience to work collaboratively in the existing processes. Let’s explore some of these opportunities for their successful collaboration:
- One of the golden opportunities for Customer Experience and HR professionals to come together is during the hiring and on-boarding process. They can collaboratively look for ways to screen individuals for the kind of attitudes and abilities that are needed to meet the organisation’s customer experience vision. For instance, during Disney Store job interviews, it conducts casting calls and role plays of in-store scenarios so that the potential candidates can demonstrate their guest interaction abilities.
- Customer experience subject matter expertise and instructional design skills are divided across two different departments. Customer experience professionals can work hand in hand with the HR to share their relevant knowledge to design and deliver training that would be appropriate to help employees become more customer-centric.
- Organisations have been clearly defining what they wish to accomplish; however, they do not seem to define how their employees need to act to achieve the objectives that they have laid out. In such a scenario, customer experience and HR can work collaboratively to ensure that the employee goal setting and evaluation processes incorporate role-specific expectations and means of measuring success which maps the employees’ efforts to the customer experience strategy.
- While an organisation embarks on its customer experience change, it is significant for the organisation to analyse how it recognises and rewards its employees. The customer experience and HR teams need to ensure that the desired employee behaviors are appropriately backed up by formal reward and recognition programs along with team celebrations.
To conclude, it is a fact that non-engaged employees do not create engaged customers. To achieve the opposite result, it is imperative that the customer experience and HR teams need to work collaboratively to engage employees in the organisation’s efforts towards creating an enriching customer experience.