Advocacy
Employee Experience: Operations Highway to Customer Experience
Employees Are People Too
By putting the employee first, the customer effectively comes first by default, and in the end, the shareholder comes first by default as well.
Richard Branson
Ding!
The doors opened to the 16th floor.
I prepared myself to be welcomed by a Toastmasters representative who would escort me to a conference room at one of the major corporate headquarters in town.
Instead, I was greeted by an ivory wall plastered with black block font: “Customer-Obsessed”.
And all of a sudden, I felt turned off.
Don’t get me wrong.
I love customers. Without customers in our current economic environment, this world would not go round. Customers have my upmost respect, and they know it.
And yet, somehow the term “customer-obsessed” irked me as it grew into a buzzword to be heard from every nook and cranny more than anything else.
So it got me thinking, and I realized my issue wasn’t the customers. It was how most companies defined customers.
Definition of a Customer
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a customer is 1) one that purchases a commodity or service, or 2) an individual usually having some specified distinctive trait.
Everyone has the first definition down. The customer is the one that gives us the bacon to take home.
But what about the second definition? Isn’t that just the definition of people? I mean, doesn’t every individual have “some specified distinctive trait”?
A customer isn’t only the ones that buy the products or the services. It includes the every end user. It includes those who are informed of the products. It includes those who are aware of the company.
And of all the customers, the employees are the most important and critical. They are the life and blood that keep the company alive.
The Heartbeat of a Company
Up until recently, I worked at a prominent supermarket as a grocery inventory controller to make ends meet. What started as a part-time seasonal position turned into 15-months of using my data analytics skills to learn about customer behavior, inventory control, and store operations.
Because I have worked in corporate America before, I was able to identify the pain points in procedures and equipment that prevented my peers from offering the best service we knew possible to the customers. Trust me when I say there were numerous opportunities for improvement.
When the higher-ups decided to spend $3 million dollars to modernize the sales floor — thereby, in my opinion, making it physically more dangerous — instead of implementing a more efficient operations system for the backroom, I knew my time was up.
How many times have you heard about how innovative and caring a company is, dreamed of working there, only to find out either from employees or after the fact that it is the total opposite behind the scenes?
One company provides state-of-the-art customer service to its shoppers when its employees endure dated internal technology, barely keeping the business afloat.
Or another company promotes itself as the pioneer in everything when its employees works 80-hour weeks with some even unable to take bathroom breaks.
In the most likely scenario, the customer would stop buying s/he is unhappy with a product or service. When an employee is unhappy with the company, he/she stops working.
Which is worse? When no one wants to buy your product or when no one wants to work at your company to make the product?
Operations Highway to Customer Experience
I’ve been listening to a lot of Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday podcasts lately. And you know what? She’s pretty smart.
She stated, “You can’t give something that you don’t have yourself.”
As an employee of a company, I can’t give a customer the best treatment possible if I can’t give my peers the best treatment possible.
So since leaving my gig at the supermarket, I have come to live by this question:
How can I, as an operations team member, improve employee experience so that the employees can provide better customer experience?
Enhancing employee experience is not only the responsibility of the human resource department. It isn’t only about giving staff fair pay or only about providing good benefits and compensation.
It is the responsibility of every individual contributor and team member.
It is:
- What information can I present to my manager so that she can best serve the CEO?
- What systems can I implement so that the sales representatives can better serve the needs of the clients?
- How can I reduce the work necessary on the production line so that the crew can hit the quota without going overtime and deliver the products to the customers on-time?
- What can I lead my team so that each member can fulfill or even exceed all client requirements?
- What can I do for my peers so that they can better serve the customers?
If I can help my peers, then my peers can help their peers. And if everyone strives to help each other, then operations of the company improve. And if operations work like clockwork, then the company can deliver the finest results to the customers.
Start with Heart
The health of a company doesn’t start from how well it can sell to customers. It starts from how well its people can treat its people. If we can’t — or won’t — provide our inside people with the right equipment, the right processes, the right resources, how can we offer customers the right products?
Employees are people. Colleagues are people. Bosses are people.
Customers are just people.
Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.
Herb Kelleher, Former CEO of Southwest Airlines
For far too long, everyone has been putting the customers on an unreachable pedestal when doing so is a disservice.
Everyone is my customer. That includes you.
And, in a way, I should probably to include me too.
