Write a 1000 word briefing paper for your senior management team on how your organisation’s HR / L&D functions might usefully partner with either a major customer or a major supplier to share good practice in respect of a current challenge.
Yoghoyogho is a European food company specializing in strained yogurt. The company has recently been experiencing issues with customer satisfaction where many of its customers have complained about issues in the quality of products they produce. Some have also complained of mislabelling and a change in flavours which has resulted in decreased sales. The company has suffered major loses which have consequently led to major layoffs and low staff morale that further affected the organisations strategy. To reverse this situation the HR and LD department hopes to work and in hand with Green World whole foods to derive quick and effective solutions to salvage the situation before it has any further impacts to the organisation’s profitability. Research indicates that a company that succeeds in streamlining the customer experience into the company culture is likely to experience a 10 – 12% increase in its revenue as the customers are happy with the products or services (Bahadur et al., 2018, p102). While this issue can be handled by the customer experience team, further research has indicated that great customer experience comes about with employee engagement hence why the Human Resources team must be on board in assisting Yoghoyogho company raise its revenue and increase customer and employee satisfaction. Below are some of the areas where the HR team in cooperation with the customer experience team can work with the organisation’s major customer Green World Whole foods to achieve the organisational goals.
Linking customer feedback and employee engagement
In 2016, the Dorchester Hotel which is one of UK’s Best Luxury hotel scooped two awards at the Distinction in Talent Management at the HR Distinction Awards and the Best UK Luxury Hotel Brand at the British Travel Awards. These achievements were as a result of their successful collaboration of the HR and people teams with the customer experience teams (Bahadur et al., 2018, p105). Yoghoyogho should consider employing a similar tactic to rebuild its brand. Almost 35% of the company’s products are purchased Green World Wholefoods therefore with the help of Green World the customer service teams can collect information on areas that need improving and areas that might be scrapped of completely or areas that could be introduced to the brand.
Research has shown that companies that liked their customer experience with employee engagement reported an improvement in their customer experience while 75% indicated that it also led to a highly motivated staff (Ahmed et al., 2020). Almost six out of ten organizations also claimed it helped them to obtain awareness into activities that directly relate to business objectives, and more than half said it enabled them to bridge excellent customer experiences to engaged staff. Sharing customer experience and staff engagement data could provide customer experience teams with a range of new opportunities (Ahmed et al., 2020). Total Fitness is one such organisation which has experienced success upon linking customer experience to employee engagement. Before applying the strategy the company, like Yoghoyogho, suffered from low staff morale and there were a lot of layoffs. At the onset of the strategy the organisation had an NPS score of -31 rose to 4 in 2 years of implementation which was 9 points above industry average (Wikhamn, 2019, p107) .
This technique would be helpful to the Human Resource team to link the customer feedback to employee engagement. Improving employee engagement and customer experience in tandem rather than treating them as separate silos might be key to increasing the company’s productivity, sales and revenue. Upon improvement and rebranding of products, Net Promoter Score is one of the effective measures the customer service can use to track the customer loyalty (Bahadar et al., 2018). Since customer experience is linked to employee engagement, a number of initiatives can be applied alongside the customer feedback to encourage employee output. From long experience in People management, often low staff morale is due to lack of employee engagement and lack of motivation. Therefore, these initiatives should work to improve these two areas.
To begin with, since the organisation aims to introduce a few changes, it is important that before the decision is made employees are consulted to offer feedback. It can be done through the reintroduction of weekly meetings which can later switch to biweekly once the implementation process is complete (Bahadar et al., 2018). Furthermore, with the current layoffs and increased turnover rate, the organisation should consider employing a rewards system in place to motivate the employees and help retain the human skills (Jawaad et al, 2019). Since the organisation is currently not fit to have monetary rewards, it can start by introducing non-monetary award but gradually progress into offering monetary rewards when the profits start to improve. Employees who are motivated are organisations biggest assets as they share common goals with the organisation and hence will drive the organisation towards success.
Consumerization of HR
Other than cooperating with the customer experience teams the Human resource department can also coordinate with the marketing department to ensure that there is flow of information both internally and externally. The organisation is seeking to rebrand based on the feedback it will receive from Green World. Marketing department is important in the process as misbranding and change of flavours has been some of the issues that have resulted to poor sales. Therefore, the customers must be informed on the changes coming in. Consumerisation of HR is popular term that has been used to imply the additional roles of Human Resources beyond recruitment, engagement and development (Dechawatanapaisai, 2018). Currently organisations have come to understand that branding not only focuses on marketing and that employees should be part made part for success (Dechawatanapaisai, 2018). Therefore, while it is the marketing department’s role to communicate the new strategy to the consumers, then the HR hold the responsibility of communicating the strategy to employees. In the case of Yoghoyogho, the HR will take up the role of training and development on the new strategies and technologies that the organisation intends to implement as it employs the new strategy. Therefore, the marketing and HR teams employ the use of social and technology-based tools, to create a universal brand message that also applies to the employees (Jawaad et al., 2018). Other than that, while HR is involved in training and developing skills, the Marketing team would also help in advertising the organisation as a great employee environment to attract new talent and reduce the organisation’s turnover rate.
Yoghoyogho has in the past ignored consumer insights and feedback and the results have been fatal. In addition to low consumer satisfaction, the organisation has been faced with low staff morale (Ahmed,2020). HR is at the centre of this issues and coordination with a major consumer and other departments will go a long way in helping reduce these issues and work towards organisational success.
References
Ahmed, T., Khan, M.S., Thitivesa, D., Siraphatthada, Y. and Phumdara, T., 2020. Impact of employees engagement and knowledge sharing on organizational performance: Study of HR challenges in COVID-19 pandemic. Human Systems Management, 39(4), pp.589-601.
Bahadur, W., Aziz, S. and Zulfiqar, S., 2018. Effect of employee empathy on customer satisfaction and loyalty during employee–customer interactions: The mediating role of customer affective commitment and perceived service quality. Cogent business & management, 5(1), p.1491780.
Dechawatanapaisal, D., 2018. Employee retention: the effects of internal branding and brand attitudes in sales organizations. Personnel Review.
Jawaad, M., Amir, A., Bashir, A. and Hasan, T., 2019. Human resource practices and organizational commitment: The mediating role of job satisfaction in emerging economy. Cogent Business & Management.
Wikhamn, W., 2019. Innovation, sustainable HRM and customer satisfaction. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 76, pp.102-110.
