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Are Your Employees the Chicken or the Egg?

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A recent survey of corporate researchers revealed that Voice of the Employee (VOE) rated a very close second to Voice of the Customer (VOC) when respondents were asked how frequently they survey different audiences. This was up from fifth place last year. At the same time, 60% of respondents indicated that the number of employee surveys will increase over the coming year. 

Why are VOE programs expanding?  Simply put, engaged employees build business success.  In the past employee surveys measured job satisfaction.  Today’s surveys are designed to go beyond satisfaction and measure employee engagement.  Engaged employees work with passion.  That passion translates to a belief of positively impacting the quality of an organization’s products and services.  Even better – that passion is contagious.   Customers become more loyal when engaged employees go the extra mile to meet their needs.  And when customer loyalty increases, so does the profitability of the company.

The needs of employees are beginning to mirror the needs of the customers.  In the past two decades, customers have become increasingly specific about what they need from businesses and businesses have responded by listening closely and making changes to accommodate those needs.    As stakeholders, the opinions and needs of both employees and customers are important when making organizational decisions.

For businesses just formalizing their process of surveying employees and customers or for those developing a more efficient approach, it may be hard to know which to tackle first.  Customer perspectives are critical to organizational decisions – and, yet, employee engagement is critical to customer perspectives! 

The good news is that the Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee programs have similar structures and resource requirements which can offer opportunities for organizational effectiveness.      Opportunities for collaboration and leveraging company resources include:

1. Survey Design –Voice of the Employee programs are usually administered by the Human Resource department.  Those surveys are designed to be taken by internal audiences and are effective communication tools for analyzing problems, opinions and reactions of employees to organizational changes.  While the audience is different and primarily external to the company, Voice of the Customer surveys are deployed with the same goal – to understand the experiences and opinions of their target audience.   And, while the VOC program may be managed by the Marketing or Customer Experience department, the expertise required to develop surveys to obtain level of satisfaction and loyalty is very similar for both audiences. The method of deploying the surveys can also be shared.  For many of our customers, further efficiency is gained by using the Vovici survey platform for both types of surveys by avoiding the cost of an additional survey tool.
2. Analysis and Reporting – Results from the Voice of the Employee surveys primarily go the Human Resources Department and, ultimately, the Management team.  Employees also receive the survey results.  The Voice of the Customer results are viewed by the Management team, employees and customers.  Program managers tailor the type of information and level of detail for each audience.  Like survey design,  the target audiences and expertise required for analysis and reporting are similar for the two programs. 
3. Implementing changes – VOE practitioners are working to identify opportunities to increase employee satisfaction and, in doing so, increase employee engagement and retention.  VOC practitioners are interested in how well they are serving their customers and strengthening the customer relationship.  While it first appears that these are separate and discrete areas of action, there are common areas of interest.  For example, employee engagement fuels customer satisfaction, and it is an area where VOE and VOC programs can – and should – join forces to implement organizational improvements.

So to answer the question who to focus on first, the employee or the customer, that will continue to be an ongoing debate.  What we do know is that the two play the most vital roles in a company.  The importance of employee engagement has never been greater and, because of its impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, is of vital interest to any Voice of the Customer program.  While the programs may be deployed from different areas of the organization, there are many opportunities and benefits to collaboration and integration.