Working for (HR) Customers?

Years ago I attended a Customer Service Programme whilst working for a food and beverage company. The title of it was “Working for Customers”. The programme was compulsory to all employees and it brought about a significant change in our perception of what we were doing and why we are doing it daily.

The programme taught us to find a customer at the end of our activities – if there wasn’t a customer, why did we spend time with it?

HR service delivery is a very important output for the HR practitioner today. If at the end of our day-to-day work, we do not see and serve a customer, we must ask ourselves what are we busy with and why? One of the ways to make sure we can answer this question is to redesign our HR activities into well-designed HR business processes.

So what is the true nature of HR services? What does it consist of?
Almost all customer services today consist of…information. And so does HR services – if you think about it in this way, HR services are things like remuneration reports, headcount numbers, advice based on specific information, results of employee surveys, etc.

So, if the true nature of HR services is information, we will want to know how we make sure our HR services is of high quality.

The customer service experts say that we need to measure quality of service (delivery) against it consistency and reliability. Consistency refers to the consistency with which we provide the particular service – this means that it should be available 24/7 or at least exceeding the customers’ expectations in this regard. Reliability of service refers to the appropriateness of the service to address the customer’s problem – therefore the measure is did the HR service provided solve the customers' specific problem or need?

It follows then that HR services are heavily dependent on the quality (the consistency and reliability) of the HR function’s information…and this is not the responsibility of the IT department!

Who are the customers of HR anyway? There are various customer group(ings) that HR must serve on a day-to-day basis, such as operations managers or line managers, all employees individually, executive management, the board of directors, labour unions, government departments (Department of Labour), other subsidiaries in the same group of companies, contractors, and so on. All of the above-mentioned entities requires consistent communication and trusted information services from the HR function!

As HR practitioners rendering services to our customers, we must be aware of and understand the processes through which (HR) information is generated and also how we can make sure that it is information of integrity – or trusted information.

Gerhard