To provide your customers with an experience that's better than they can get from the competition, it's vital to employ the latest techniques and strategies in customer service. Among these are human capital management (HCM) and the technology for it. That's something you may not have considered, even though it's intuitive that employees who are happier in their jobs make customers happier too. Promoting a workplace culture and systems that support their staff's work-life balance, companies can influence the customer experience. By exacting a positive impact on the HCM Wheel of Success and Outcomes—a way of looking at the inputs and outputs of the employee life cycle—businesses are able to amplify their overall success. Improvements follow in recruitment, productivity, assessment, engagement, and retention. Those last two pertain to both employees and customers.
What Is the HCM Wheel of Success and Outcomes?
The HCM Wheel comprises the interrelated, interdependent parts of the employee life cycle. When working in concert, these bring about positive, holistic outcomes for employees and their organizations. The HCM Wheel pertains to every touchpoint between a company and its employees that intersects with the customer experience. Breakthroughs in employers' ability to influence the HCM Wheel are at hand, but these come only through breakthroughs in HCM technology—which are already here. Standing in the way of better HCM technology, however, are legacy HCM systems; cobbled together over time, their poorly connected components impede retailers from delivering the systems within an environment that can create positive engagement and spawn positive employee experience.
What Is Modern HCM Tech? How Does It Help?
Modern HCM technology isn't just software-as-a-service and it isn't just the cloud. It's a single application to handle an ever-growing slice of the employee life cycle. Modern HCM technology provides just one access point to employee information, and that information is more accurate than it used to be. The real-time processing of this data, which modern HCM technology enables, helps organizations tailor the work experience to employees' needs. Modern HCM technology streamlines a company's ability to manage not only core HR, but higher-level activities too. This encompasses the full spectrum—everything from planning, scheduling, time and attendance, payroll, tax, employee assistance programs, and benefits administration, to recruiting, performance management and other facets of talent management. And, through better systems for employee self-service, modern HCM technology keeps the basics of employment—those elements of core HR listed above—from frustrating employees.
What Does the Research Say?
To realize these benefits, most companies have work to do in terms of upgrading their HCM systems. Notably, only 32 percent of organizations have consistency across their HR processes, according to Aberdeen's 2013 “HR Trends: It’s a Brave New World Report.” Leading the way,