Why is employee engagement is foundational to customer engagement?

Digital Business

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is foundational to customer engagement. It is highly unlikely that an employee who hates their job or who is disengaged from what they do will create a great customer experience.

Employee engagement, by any number of studies and research reports, leads to higher levels of business results. Most notable is Gallup’s work in this area evidenced by Gallup’s own Q12 engagement survey. Gallup scientists spent decades writing and testing hundreds of questions, because their wording and order mean everything when it comes to accurately measuring engagement. Their research yielded Gallup’s Q12 survey: the 12 questions that measure the most important elements of employee engagement. Gallup has studied survey results from more than 25 million employees around the world.

• The lost suitcase and a grumpy old man’ – a story about employee engagement – Blog post by Ian Golding  – Customer centric organizations tend to have a…

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Will standard software suite help moving to digital? 1/2

As mentioned in my previous article, a Digital Transformation has many side effects. One of them on the IT side is to aim for application landscape simplification, without limiting the UX. Following Gartner point of view, we all know that Complexity leads to failure.

Replying to this trend, some vendors tends to advise to go for standards (preferably their own ones of course). That is for instance the case of SAP as they explain very well their point of view in their recent article “Winning the Digital Battle with Simplicity” while promoting HANA.

But does simplication implies necessarily standardisation?
Is it actually the real keypoint?

Taxis vs UberPOP: When Dinosaurs try to fight against Darwin

Recently, relationship between taxi drivers and UberPOP users has clearly deteriorated in France: Some UpberPOP drivers have been assaulted in different cities where they operate, like in Strasbourg or in Paris. Even an UberPOP customer has been subject of violent attack by taxi drivers in Lyon. And this is not only a French issue since we could already notice similar reports in the area of Amsterdam or in The Hague some weeks ago.

To justify such behaviour, Taxi drivers claims that they are facing an unfair situation where Uber is stealing their business with much less constraints than them to operate it. Seeing their business decreasing very quickly, they feel high pressure and react to it in such (very bad) manner.

Since Uber, like AirBnB or Amazon, are to me very good examples of the new digital era, I was asking myself if Taxi were right in their complain and if they are handling the issue the right way. I’d like to share my views on it since this may be applied to any business facing Today a digital transformation.

Digital transformation: just a trend or a reality?

IT has been subject of many trends in the past 15 years.

Some were effective and had a deep effect on the way companies are using it. Usage of email as first communication factor has been a very good example even if Today some, like Atos, are thinking of replacing it by social media platforms.

Some others were more like fashions pushing many CEOs and CIOs to adopt from day to day the strategies that strong gurus were predicting to be unavoidable. It has been funny for instance to notice how outsourcing was “the way to go” 15 years ago, then being neglected (see particularly 2006 conference of Prof Strassmann: “Is Outsourcing Profitable?“) and now coming back again.
Were companies having deeply outsourced their IT more successful than the ones having kept their know-how in-house? Difficult to say. There are success stories on both sides.

All in all, we may understand that, after the Y2K issue that required strong attention of business to their IT, new subjects popped up on a very regular basis driving budget choices, sometimes with expected ROI that were slightly theoretical.

And now, for about 2 years, a new topic has risen up: Digital Transformation !

But what do we actually mean by this? And how CFOs and CEOs can be sure that the expensive changes such approach requires are a necessity for their company growth?