Customer experience is all about people getting what they need in their lives.
Human resources in organisations are key to designing and delivering great customer experience.
So Human Resources function can make a great difference in helping companies achieve customer experience initiatives.
It is however sad to note that in some organisations, Human Resources Departments are failing to live up to expectation and are rated as unfriendly, unhelpful and not supportive towards employees and external clients in need of their service.
In this article we explore ways in which the Human Resources function can adopt and demonstrate customer service experience.
λ Exhibiting a Customer Service Mentality
This aspect requires that everyone in HR must endeavor to treat every employee within the organisation as an internal client and see the HR mission and value proposition as customer service centred.
This entails that every employee has to be valued highly and treated with utmost dignity and respect.
Periodic customer satisfaction surveys are key to measure the customer service performance
λ Customer Service Surveys
HR can deploy customer satisfaction surveys to identify where they fall short in satisfying their clients who are the employees.
The survey may solicit information regarding requests they would have made to HR, how important they were and how well service rendered matched their expectations.
Employees may also be asked to rate their interaction with HR to determine the level of satisfaction.
λ Interaction with External Customers
HR has a critical role to play in improving service delivery towards external clients.
In most cases if the HR Department excels in providing excellent customer service to internal clients, it can roll out a training programme for all other employees which has a positive influence in the way external clients are treated.
The HR Department becomes an influential centre for customer service excellence for the organisation.
λ Cross-functional collaboration
This function is essential to Customer Experience in the following ways:
(1) customers see a company as “one”,
(2) aligning the company to customers is more likely to succeed than insisting the customers align to the company,
(3) customer pain is often the result of weak handoffs and communication gaps between functional areas, and
(4) silos are a source of wasted costs, time and energy usually for the company and customers alike.
λ Knowledge management
Knowledge management is key to Customer Experience in the following ways:
(1) customers don’t want to repeat themselves and they expect consistency in their dealings with the company over time and across locations and among departments: customers see a company as a single unit; and
(2) efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge across the company can significantly save time, energy, and costs, and improve morale, productivity, and return on assets.
Paul Nyausaru is an OD Practitioner and leadership coach. For all your OD interventions and leadership development training you can get in touch with him on whatsapp/call +263774062756 or Email pnyausaru@gmail.com
Chiedza Kadare is an OD Practitioner. You can get in touch with her on whatsapp/call +263 77 283 0986 or Email chiedza.kadare@gmail.com
