It’s time for a shake-up in the services sector. In the aftermath of disruptive forces such as offshoring and digitalisation, the sector is finally facing the opportunity to ‘play a new game’, where investing in relationships represents the true competitive advantage.
In Australia, forward-thinking companies are responding to this cultural shift by putting employee and customer engagement high on the agenda. Companies are beginning to make the connection between employee and customer engagement, productivity and profitability.
Increasing profitability
It’s a well-known fact that engaged customers represent a premium; not only do they buy more, but stay longer, cost less to serve, co-produce and tell their friends. This lifts profitability at every level of your organisation, both today and tomorrow.
It’s well recognised that highly engaged employees deliver 20% high productivity and up to 45% higher job performance.
Yet the state of both customer engagement and employee engagement in Australia, points to a space ripe for disruption.
Customers equal profit
FuturePeople has developed a unique methodology to enhance organisational performance called Heartonomics™: the economic value that genuine human connection represents in a business.
Heartonomics™ is based on the philosophy that engaged employees powered by Emotional Intelligence (EI), lead to engaged customers, which in turn leads to profit. Heartonomics™ is revolutionising the way organisations view engagement. It redefines engagement as a key business driver where employee and customer engagement are seen as intrinsically linked and the key to enhanced bottom line performance.
Heartonomics™ takes a scientific approach and quantifies the dollar value of engagement to organisations to make the business case for investment, deploys a rigorous diagnostic to identify key opportunities and then provides a range of EI interventions in the talent acquisition, development and leadership space, to relationships internally and with customers.
Extraordinary engagement
Research shows that highly engaged staff go that extra mile to give discretionary effort that can delight customers, drive innovation and enhance performance. Our research shows the additional value that is created by powering engagement with emotional intelligence (EI), to access what we call the ‘triple bottom line’ via extraordinary engagement.
EI employees form more meaningful interactions and relationships with colleagues and customers. They facilitate knowledgeable conversations and create personalised interactions, ensuring customers are treated ‘from the heart’—that is, with empathy, respect and understanding which in turn leads to loyalty.
When customer service experiences consistently exceed expectations, customers form loyalty to your brand in the long-term. With 70% of customer decisions based on emotional factors, the way we make customers feel will determine whether they stay or stray and most importantly whether they can be leveraged to act as loyal brand advocates who do your selling for you.
Similarly, EI leaders deliver an experience to employees that connects them to purpose and results in an emotional connection to the organisation. This ensures they feel that their contribution matters and the organisation values them as a whole person not just an employee, which in turn leads to greater effort.
The power of your brand
In today’s customer-centric world, happy customers truly are the holy grail. Digitalisation has placed the power of your brand squarely with the customer.
To truly leverage the economic value of feelings through Heartonomics™, it’s crucial to attract, motivate and engage the right talent for your organisation; all the way from the top of the organisation to the front line.
Recruiting for and developing EI to drive engagement is critical, to build the emotional quotient (EQ) of your organisation to deliver on your brand promise and build long term trust with your employees and customers.
