Traditionally, companies and organisations have been built from the top, with much more attention being paid to who is at the top of the business and much less consideration given to the people at the ‘bottom of the pile’. There is a lot of talk about creating great customer service, and excellent customer experiences, many thousands of books and even more blog posts have been written about how to achieve these ‘utopian ideals’.
I believe that great customer experiences start with great employee experiences. If your employees love working for you, they will enjoy coming to work, and that will be reflected in the service that they provide to their customers, whether they be external or internal customers.
As far as I’m concerned, everyone in a non-customer facing role in a company is responsible for supporting the customer experience – that’s why they are often referred to as support functions. These are departments such as HR, Finance, IT, Marketing. Let’s take each of these functions and look briefly at how they can influence employee and customer experience:
HR are often responsible for recruitment. Are the HR people really focussed on getting the right people into the business to provide great service, and are they involving front line managers in this process? Are the policies and procedures of the business aligned to the values, and designed to create a great workplace?
Finance: Are budgets designed to provide the front line of the business with everything they need to provide the best possible service for the customer? Are front line managers and team members consulted on their needs?
IT: Are the needs of the front line people prioritised and is the IT equipment in the front line the best that it can be? Whose IT needs are more important – are the front line teams given equal priority with senior managers?
Marketing: Is the picture that the marketing department is painting of the business realistic? Are they attracting customers to a reality, or to a pipedream?
I have recently been doing some research into the businesses that win places in the Sunday Times Top 100 Companies to Work for in the U.K. All of them regularly give all their employees a ‘good listening to’ and act on the feedback they receive. They often have Chief Executives who spend a lot of their time out in the business, asking people what they need in order to perform their jobs to the very best of their ability, and making sure that is provided.
In my opinion, you will never create a consistently great customer experience unless you first set out to create a great employee experience. The only way that can be done is by turning the traditional view of business upside down.