Strengthening Relationships With Employees

Pay attention to your employees

Strong customer relationships are partly dependent on close attention to your employees who make a difference for the company, and who help the customer relationship to endure and deepen. Companies focused on relationship marketing need to consider their human resources in a new light.

Employees, like customers, should be singled out for the value they want and the value they can and will create. All customers are not of equal value and should not be treated equally, as awarding equal treatment to all has the undesirable effect of discriminating against your best customers, and giving preferential treatment to your worst.

The same logic must apply to employees as well. Those employees who matter most to the company's success merit special treatment and individualized care, just as the company's best customers do. Most companies offer their best employees both reward and recognition, with the occasional promotion as part of both. But the relationship marketing oriented company does much more. Its measures include:

Devising employee-centric development should be planned with each employee having a personal plan to help them along their own unique journey. This should be in a way that matters to them, while creating shareholder value.

These databases go beyond traditional Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) systems to describe the person, track their progress, and quantify the value each creates for the firm. They all track processes, customers and roles matched to specific people, with the databases playing an important role in the matching and identification of skills upgrading potential. This is useful for employees with a broader scope of knowledge and ability to function effectively in many areas.

Technology

Technology that can make the employee more effective, instead of merely more efficient should be implemented. A good example is prompting questions for the bank teller in real time conversation with the customer.

The work culture and leadership should be geared to foster trust and cohesiveness. The management should also be capable of identifying the personality profile the company should ideally recruit. Hire for attitude and then train the people for skill.

Attitudes cannot be learned. For instance, the Internet company, Yahoo! has a four-point basis for hiring the talent that the company believes makes opportunities happen. These are people skills, spheres of influence (sort of like talent magnets, each with an ability to attract good people), "zoom in, zoom out" (having relentless focus, with perspective), and passion (having the drive and will to do something, anything, they consider valuable).

The most important link in creating customer value is the employee relationship. The process by which this relationship is enhanced begins by measuring the state of the relationship today - which involves thinking more broadly than simply measuring employee satisfaction. Then relationship quality targets should be set and progress managed and measured. Have a plan to help the employee according to the perspectives and needs of each individual. Now, deeper and more profitable customer relationships are at hand.