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Hi, this is Ron Kaufman with Jeff Eilersen. We’re looking at what are the major issues that clients have when they come and ask us for help. We’ve already covered two. Jeff number three.

Jeff: The third one interestingly is that more and more clients are paying attention to internal relationships. Internal service relationships they have with each other as employees and staff, but also with third-party contractors, suppliers who represent them and their service to customers.

Ron:  So distributors or resellers or somebody who still you’re part of our side because we together are working to serve that customer. You’re calling all of that internal service.

Jeff:  Yes that’s right. And people showing up looking for employee engagement and connecting the dots between service and service relationships and employee engagement. And what they’re realizing is that if you want to provide excellent customer service externally then that’s dependent on how good the service is behind the scenes in the back office and the processes that support the people who are providing service. 

Ron: So those people who are customer-facing are saying, “Gee I’m getting great service now. It’s a lot easier for me to give that service”.

Jeff:  Yeah, that back office service is poor, there’s only so much the front line people can do.

Ron:  And our leaders understanding this are coming to us saying this is the problem we need to tackle first, or is that more like they come with this and we go well we have to fix this? 

Jeff: It’s a little bit of both. But there’s more awareness of internal relationships and partner building and service going on, which is why you see employee engagement is so important. But connecting the dots between employee engagement and customer satisfaction and customer experience, I see all starting to come together. 

Ron:  Right. So it’s internal service experiences that either create a high degree of satisfaction (My customers are happy and I’m happy with the relationship I have with my colleagues) or you’re asking me to do better for my customers (but over here I’m frustrated and that lowers employee engagement). 

Jeff: That’s right. And it’s very rare that you see an organization that has high customer satisfaction and low employee engagement. They’re symbiotic.

Ron: There’s a sync between the two. I know when Harvard Business Review did the article about us on the four rules. And the first rule was Don’t start by educating or training your customer-facing, start with your internal service providers.  So are we seeing in pure shared services, IT department, finance department back-end operations an awareness like “you know what we got to give our colleagues” here?

Jeff: Yeah, from both the perspective of the receivers of shared service saying Hey we need a better service, I’m not gonna put up with this thing, I’m not going to put up with that anymore and we can look elsewhere. And so the shared services looking at “Hey we have to operate as if we’re our own company, we have to have our own service excellence if we want to maintain the business here”. 

Ron: Right and contribute to the business sector. We’re seeing Chief Financial Officers and Chief Technical Officers and not just theCustomer Experience Officers and the Marketing Officers who would have always understood the importance. 

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a very big growing segment for us.

Ron: Yeah, very good. Well, no matter what your position may be, you need to consistently improve the quality of service that your people in your team provide to other people, other teams, other departments. So that together you can provide better service to the external paying customer. Something that more and more people are understanding today, and we’re able to help. We’ll be right back.