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How Customer-Centric HR can Grow Your Business

by Julie Miles / October 5, 2022

Reducing the churn rate is crucial in a business world where customers can easily jump from one brand to another. Every department in an organization becomes the marketing department, including Human Resources (HR). 

As a result, HR leaders get the opportunity to prove their value to the organization and make a meaningful impact that boosts business growth. Using a customer-centric approach in Human Resources helps you strategically adjust HR practices to improve customer engagement and retention.

As you explore innovative solutions to impact your organization, advanced technology like a cloud HCM can help streamline employee experience. Read on to discover more about customer-centric HR and how to incorporate it into your HR practices. 

Customer-Centric HR: Collaborating With External Customers

When HR executives talk about customers, they usually refer to employees (as internal customers). 

However, a new wave of HR professionals collaborates with external customers to improve HR practices. Integration between employees and customers through the human resource department is gaining momentum. 

According to research, the future of HR is customer-centric. HR will significantly increase its value and help external customers build stronger relationships with the organization. 

For this reason, HR’s emerging contribution is to create practices and activities that can build customer value as well as improve the employee experience. Achieving this requires HR-customer collaboration with two-way communication. 

Understanding How HR Collaborates With Customers

This collaboration goes beyond customer complaint lines and satisfaction surveys. The idea is to avoid backward-looking and focus on informing future practices. Instead of only concentrating on how the experience was for customers, identify what would make their future visits more enjoyable. HR can use this information to improve employee behavior and performance. 

Since HR professionals don’t usually have frequent, direct contact with customers, they should partner with the sales department to obtain customer insights and infuse them into HR practices. 

As you break down the silos between HR and Sales, you get the opportunity to know the voice of the customer (VOC). Your VOC research should show a 360-degree picture of customers. Dive deep into every channel that gives insights into your customers. That may include: 

  • Online reviews
  • Social listening
  • Customer service data

Find out what customers value the most in an employee and whether they think the company is true to its mission, vision, and values. Use what you will learn to inform HR decisions. 

Making HR Practices Customer-Centric

The most valuable HR practices meet customers’ needs. HR should ensure the organization’s employee staffing, communication, development, governance, and reward practices encourage skills and motivation necessary for customer commitment. Such HR norms build customer loyalty in the long run. Here’s how to make HR practices customer-centric. 

Customer’s Voice in Staffing

HR professionals should consider customer-centric values in all phases of talent flow, starting from the hiring and promotion criteria. What norms, values, skills, and knowledge would customers want key workers to have? What would customers want to see less or more of in employees’ behaviors? 

After all, the customer is the ultimate boss in every business. Customers will likely remain loyal to an organization that hires staff based on their standards. 

HR leaders should collaborate with other departments to create a solid hiring plan that helps them achieve customer satisfaction goals. 

Customer-Led Employee Training

Employees would greatly benefit from value-adding training programs. Engaging customers in employee training can be a great way of achieving that.

For example, Nemours is a pediatric foundation focusing on children’s health. The foundation involves patients’ parents in its yearly leadership development retreat. Parents come and speak to the foundation’s leaders about what the health care service was like for their kids. Through these insights and stories, the foundation’s leaders in the retreat can learn how to improve the care at the hospital. 

Customer-centric training programs for employees are powerful. That’s because the feedback comes from a product or service user, making the key takeaways from the training more actionable for workers. 

HR leaders should reevaluate professional development programs and identify opportunities to nurture employee skills that can improve customer satisfaction and enhance customer experience. 

Customer-Based Reward Practices

Standards for the quality of service should reflect customer expectations and improve customer experience. Conversely, employee reward practices are often evaluated from the inside and not outside the organization. 

The concept of customers directly rewarding workers is not new. It happens every time in the restaurant industry: diners tipping servers who deliver quality services. Eventually, the diner feels special, the server gets rewarded immediately, and the restaurant sells more meals. 

In this example, it would be odd for the hotel’s manager to decide who gets the most tips. Why should the restaurant manager, who might be one or several steps away from the customer-employee interaction, decide whether the service was excellent or not? 

Organizations should empower customers to give employees feedback directly. Then, use this feedback in their reward program. Employee bonuses, for instance, should be tied to customer experience reviews and ratings. 

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An All-in-One Cloud HCM System to Improve Employee Experience

As you strive to make Human Resources customer-centric, ensure employee experience and satisfaction aren’t overlooked. After all, there’s a direct link between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. Your workforce is the driving force behind customer satisfaction. 

Happy employees translate to happy customers. Unhappy employees equal unhappy customers. It might not be as simple as that, but it’s not too far off as a general rule of thumb. 

isolved is an all-in-one Human Capital Management (HCM) system offered by Platinum Group that improves the onboarding experience and increases employee engagement. Here’s how it helps you employ, enable, and empower your workforce: 

  • Automate manual tasks
  • Have the whole employee journey in a single platform
  • Eliminate redundant data entry to save time
  • Complete HR tasks from any device and at any time
  • Empower employees with self-service tools

Whether you need HR, accounting, or payroll solutions, isolved is the technology you need. It can be overwhelming with busy business days and many important activities to attend to. 

At Platinum Group, we have the experience (over 20 years) and everything it takes to streamline your business’s HR, accounting, and payroll. Schedule a demo of isolved to see how it improves your employee experience. 

Tags: Learning Management Systems Company Growth Employee Retention Local Payroll Customer Satisfaction

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Julie Miles

Julie Miles

Julie’s passion is to act as a liaison between the Platinum team, their wonderful clients, and the community, striving to tell their stories and make connections.