Leaders Play Essential Role in Generating Customer Orientation Among Staff Employees

It is widely understood that the more your organization's employees are oriented to customer needs, the more likely is your organization to receive high ratings of performance from those customers. This is true not only in the service sector, but also the manufacturing sector.

What are the factors that increase employee customer orientation ("ECO")? Liao and Subramony took at look at this issue and found a number of factors, the most obvious being proximity to the consumer. Customer-contact employees, such as customer service and sales personnel, had a greater ECO than did those in production roles (e.g., product design and production), who, in turn, had a greater ECO than support staff (HR, IT, and accounting). No surprise there, certainly, but it's not all that useful a finding on its own, because it doesn't tell an organization what it can do to improve its ECO.

Liao and Subramony also looked at the role of leaders, calling the extent to which an senior leadership is oriented toward customer needs "leader customer orientation" ("LCO"). While they found a positive relationship between the senior leadership team's customer orientation and ECO across all employee groups, regardless of proximity, they found a stronger connection between LCO and ECO among support staff (i.e., those farthest from customers). This was a predicted result, as support staff, being farther from the day-to-day expression of customer needs, will benefit more from leadership on this topic than those who are much more involved with consumers.

Thus, those organizations seeking to focus strategically on consumers will do well to hire customer-oriented senior leaders, then training them on how to develop customer orientation among employees. Some of the recommended mechanisms suggested by these authors and others include:

• involve all employees in product-usage studies
• implement supportive human resource management practices to create a positive service climate in order to help employees across the board understand customer needs
• service recovery training to ehance problemsovling, interpersonal, and perspective-taking skills
• incorporation of the "voice of the customer" into design and manufacturing of products.

From: Liao, H. and Subramony, M. (2008). Employee customer orientation in manufacturing organizations: Joint influences of customer proximity and the senior leadership team. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(2), 317-328.