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The (Tech) Link Between Employee Engagement And Customer Satisfaction

20 March 2018
Bram Nawijn
Case

What is your company focusing on? Is it employee engagement or customer satisfaction? The two seem completely disconnected to many companies. But in today’s digital economy, a new way of doing business has emerged that allows for an alliance between employees and customers.

Engaged employees have the power to deliver your brand promise and drive company growth. They listen to customer’s concerns, interact with them to solve their problems, and they go above and beyond to ensure a great customer experience that will bring those delighted customers back. Some of these satisfied customers will go on to become brand advocates, telling their family and their colleagues how great they felt doing business with you. This will enhance your brand as an employer as well, as you will continue to attract talented employees who want to become a part of your customer-centric culture.

In this article we’ll be looking at the role that technology plays in bringing these two stakeholders together, to ensure that the scenario we described above turns into a reality for your company.

Engaging employees in the digital workplace

The employee experience is the sum of all the interactions between that employee and your company. Throughout this experience, a number of emotions, processes, people and objects are involved, and they can either be linked effectively to attract, engage and retain top talent or they can be disconnected and perpetuate high turnover and disengagement.

Technology is what binds these processes, people and objects in the digital workplace. Using new approaches such as design thinking and employee journey maps, HR specialists are now focusing on understanding and improving this employee experience  using tools such as pulse surveys and employee net promoter scores to measure employee engagement.

Employee engagement technology helps companies to:

  • enable new ways of communicating at work
  • enhance agility and collaboration
  • improve knowledge and learning
  • Improve productivity

Ongoing engagement

Keeping employees motivated and on top of their goals requires a dedicated management approach. The problem is that most managers often find it difficult to engage with their employees on a frequent basis due to the demands of their role and the huge amount of work they have to do each day. It takes time to understand what each team member and what the team as a whole needs.

Continuous feedback applications and pulse surveys have made this possible, enabling managers to stay on top of employee engagement trends in their company. Similar to social tools, that have been shown to be some of the most powerful enablers of employee engagement over the last few years, pulse-like surveys are a smart technological approach to measuring employee engagement levels and capturing essential data about what drives employees to perform better, to become better and to communicate better. This type of survey is usually cloud-based, enabling employees to enjoy a high degree of mobility and flexibility when it comes to devices and software usage.


HR Automation

The need to reduce time spent on administrative costs as well as the costs of HR service delivery, has lead to the increased adoption of HR automation solutions that streamline key processes such as recruitment, onboarding, employee learning, performance management and leadership development.

When all these disciplines are brought together, they provide a much more cohesive employee experience that enables better engagement.

Micro-learning tools, for example, help employees access and absorb information faster and more efficiently than older, traditional ways of learning. Microlearning is a new method of learning complex concepts and tasks in small and easy-to-understand chunks delivered in different types of digitally obtained media (text, video, and so on). It involves learning activities that actively engage the employee within a short amount of time. These learning activities consist of bite-sized lessons that are aimed at specific outcomes and employee needs. When they are automated in specific workflows, for example in an employee onboarding program or a leadership development one, they provide increase efficiency both for the HR department as well as for the learning participants.

How does this connect to customer success?

The service-profit chain theory has been around since 1994 and it’s proving to be ever more relevant in today’s digital business environment. This idea establishes relationships between profitability, customer loyalty and employee satisfaction. The links in the chain (which should be regarded as propositions) are as follows:

  • Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty.
  • Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction.
  • Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers.
  • Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees.
  • Employee satisfaction, in turn, results primarily from high-quality support services and policies that enable employees to deliver results to customers.

via Harvard Business Review

The commitment to high-quality both in delivering services and products, as well as in managing the internal processes and workforce, is what drives customer satisfaction. A company that is committed to create an engaging workplace, where the needs of employees are met, where they are provided with the necessary tools and processes to deliver quality products and services, is a company that delivers quality. And that’s the key to a satisfied customer - quality products and services delivered by engaged employees.

Internal quality has many dimensions that we can analyze in terms of workplace design, job design, employee selection and development, employee engagement and recognition and customer service tools.

At TJIP, we pride ourselves with a well-defined culture of collaboration and innovation, that employees connect to. This enables us to work effectively, both internally and with our outsourcing partners, in multiple locations around the world to deliver quality software products for our clients. The way we organize work and product delivery is a strong employee engagement driver. This, in turn, translates to satisfied clients who enjoy our work ethic and the results of this work.

Building a community that brings all stakeholders together

With so many stakeholders and so many technology applications, it becomes easy for ruptures to occur, leaving room for unmet expectations, ineffective business processes and a general lack of overview.

To navigate all these variables, companies should strive to create business ecosystems, or as we like to call them, communities, around people and technologies. All stakeholders, business processes and technology applications should therefore come together for one single unified goal: people success.

It is our strong belief that breakthrough platform developments never come from one company. Instead, they happen through a community of people seeking advancement, working together: engaged employees, satisfied partners and delighted customers.

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