How do I meet customer expectations?

Grant Leboff: One of the challenges that I think a lot of businesses have, is aligning what they provide with the perceptions that their customers actually have. So how does a business go about starting to achieve that?

Susannah Schofield: I think you raise a really good point and it's so important to have those two aligned. If you look at most of the successful businesses at the moment, their board and their customer and employee needs are aligned. They have one set of objectives, and that's important because, if your employees know what your customers want and your customers know they're getting that from their employees, you obviously have success. Where that becomes a really difficult juxtaposition is where they're fighting against each other. You take some of the high tech companies, Amazon, Facebook, they really understand what their customers want and their employees are totally behind that. And they're behind in their strategy and driving. But even down to the likes of John Lewis [UK department store chain] it doesn't have to be big and commercial and cutting edge technology, actually, it can just be about understanding what a company and employee is, and what that brand's about. What we do at Dice Matrix is we try and measure the two. By simple appraisals were able to take what customer views are and employee views and put them together and most companies will do an employee engagement survey and a customer survey, but the trouble is, is they'll do them in blissful isolation of each other, get the results back and think, oh, I don't know what to do with that! What we do is we ergonomically put them together, so actually we can measure the gap because in the simplest of forms, if your employee wants this and your customer wants that and that gap is enormous, you're probably in quite a difficult position.

Grant Leboff: Let's say you do that and there is a gap, how does a company then go about bridging that gap? Are there strategies that you then put in place having looked at whatever those results are, to bridge that between customer and ...

Susannah Schofield: We tend to give the results and we're very, very fact based, so rather than 'poacher turned gamekeeper', we don't offer any of the consultancy that backs it up. We do just come in and measure and we can take a moment in time and measure to give a temperature gauge of where that business is now, so it's important to understand that if you've just bought a company or you've taken in another brand or you want to grow, how do you feel right at this moment in time? Then we'll come back and we'll test it again and we'll do a progress analysis report between one and two, so that if you've spent a lot of money on marketing, on sales, whatever you're doing and investing in, actually has your employee engagement improved and has your customer engagement improved over that period of time to enable you to really understand that you've got the best bang for your buck? We make actions and considerations. We benchmark against best practice, about what competitors are doing and put all of that in, but they're just recommendations. We don't fulfil any of it and I think, that for me, allows us to stay really clean and full of integrity. If I'm working for you and you've got a business that doesn't need anything done, that's absolutely fine. Well done. You. I'm not always looking for the little bit to gain the next bit of consultancy.

Grant Leboff: In terms of the best practice, what are some the things that you see companies do? Because obviously you're going back in later and maybe seeing how they've bridged that gap. Are there typical strategies that you've seen in your own evidence, that those have worked? Yeah. It's really interesting because I think it was always customer is king, but actually employees are equally as important. One of my favourite statistics is; for every one percent you engage your employees, you put nine percent on your bottom line.

Susannah Schofield: We've worked with some amazing retail outlets, where actually just by educating that frontline customer facing person... let's take a hairdressing salon, when they leave, rather than saying, thanks ever so much, you actually say ' Have you got your diary, shall we book on? Your hair looks amazing, I watched it in this shampoo. Do you want to buy that?' Just those little bits improve the bottom line, but if your employees are engaged, they'll deliver that. And it doesn't just need to be in the retail space. You know, manufacturing goes that little bit above and beyond what they do. Rather than leaving at dead on 5:30, actually just finished that bout of work to get it done, because they're bought into the ergonomics and the ethos of that company. That osmosis for me is where you actually become really saturated in what you should be doing. I think the more you can absorb your employees in for them to understand, and the better leadership you have, the more successful your company will be.