CEO + HR + Customer/Employee Experience

Following my post yesterday regarding HR in the Social Business Era, Josh James, CEO of Domo posted his thoughts on the use of ‘social’ by big company CEO’s-in that they are almost invisible in this realm. http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/07/12/ceos-afraid-of-going-social-are-doing-shareholders-a-massive-disservice/

The comment from David Churbuck is a great example of a failure to see the opportunity in using social channels both internally and externally to develop a stronger link between the employee experience and the customer experience. The content of what a CEO or an HR person posts to any social network is within their control and provides an excellent opportunity to share knowledge, respond quickly to problems, and match the branding message to the humans inside the organization.

It is the silence of the people with the “C” level titles to recognize that the more remote they are from the employees in the organization and the customers the more difficult the recovery will be. When problems arise, be it a dive in the stock value, a large recall due to quality issues, a class action lawsuit based on poor employee relations practices, an oil spill etc., the more difficult the recovery will be. People are no longer content with the stock PR responses to problems as they tend to generate distrust based on too many experiences with a PR response that does not reflect the real actions of the company decision makers.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating experiences for a customer is that the marketing and advertising messages bring one to a business only to discover that the people behind the brand do not reflect the expectations set out. A significant contributor to this disconnection is internal communication weaknesses that can be found in many organizations but the larger the organization, the bigger the problem. This type of problem is often found in the presentation of a role and company culture by a recruiter and hiring manager vs. the experience of the employee once on staff.

Consider this one point for now: the outsourcing of many jobs overseas has resulted in not just job loss locally but in an upsurge in customer dissatisfaction. There are noted problems with quality, shipping issues for tangible products, difficulty understanding the CSA, inability of the CSA to satisfactorily respond to a problem. Yet, companies are still taking this tactic in a bid to save short-term dollars while ignoring the long-term costs. This has become such a huge issue for large corporations in particular that customers and employees alike are no longer committed to the success of the business.

There is sufficient evidence in the social network realm for any CEO to gain awareness of how significant the problem is-yet they remain invisible, only briefly showing up behind a PR façade.