Employees or customers?

Who should I target with my incentives? My employees or my customers?

Employees are in fact your most important customers.

Your customers are the ones you invoice. They are the ones who create positive figures with multiple zero on your P&L Statements. You want to take care of them, making sure that they are happy customers, listen to them to anticipate their needs, making them bigger customers.

How could this be made possible without your employees?

The interactions with your customers happen through your employees. They are the face of your company. They need to be close to the customers in order to know whether they are happy or not. They need the skills to understand the customer needs, and eventually turn it into innovation.

This is becoming more and more important with the progression of the technologies:

• The rise of Internet and social media empower your customers.
• The back-offices are converging with front-offices

The value don’t get created in back-offices anymore but through our direct interactions with our customers

If you want to get deeper into this, I recommend you the book “Employee First, Customer Second” from Vineet Nayar. This book covers the different drivers to make your employees more efficient and happy.

Your employees are NOT with you for the same reasons as your customers.

Employees are with you because they like doing what they do (at least they should!), they share your corporate values, they can realize great things, eventually they get paid, etc. Customers are with you because you have the best products and services, at the best price, with the best customer service, the most reliable continuity, etc.

Similarly, you don’t have the same expectations for your employees as you have for your customers. You expect your employees to be loyal, independent, creative, cheap, etc. Your customers should be easy to manage, solvable, returning, etc.

Motivation is nothing but finding the match between your expectations and the ones of your stakeholders. Once this match and its associated objectives are identified, try to reach and to beat these objectives by creating a real partnership with these stakeholders.

Naturally, most companies tend to focus to their customer first (customer is king!). But don’t forget that employees are (internal) customers too, and probably your most important customers.