Fairness in Customer and Employee Experience
Introduction
Have you ever received a call from a company telling you that, based on your usage, they recommend a different package that would cost you less? Or that they’re suspending a service because you haven’t used it in a long time? This kind of call embodies one of the foundational concepts in delivering excellent customer experience: fairness. Although it may cause short-term losses for the company, in reality it helps earn the customer’s trust and turns them into a lifetime customer — loyalty that translates into substantial long-term profits.
In this article, I’ll discuss fairness as a core value that must be extended to both customers and employees to ensure a distinctive experience for them.
Fairness in Customer Experience
Customer-centric companies care deeply that this feeling is widespread among all their customers. We’re not just talking about real unfairness — even if the unfairness is merely a customer’s perception, these companies investigate the case immediately and take corrective action if it’s confirmed, or clarify the situation to dispel any misunderstanding.
When any pricing change is made for the better, it’s applied to all subscribed customers as a matter of fairness. That’s why some companies start informing customers about an upcoming promotion before the launch date, so that a customer who subscribed or bought just a few days before doesn’t feel cheated.
Customer experience teams often draw on frontline employees to uncover unfair procedures and inequitable policies that need either modification or full elimination. They rely primarily on the voice-of-customer program to identify experiences that customers perceive as unfair, then work to redesign them.
And when a company changes its subscription packages for any reason — if the change benefits the customer, it’s reflected directly in the customer’s records, rather than waiting for the customer to complain so the request can then be processed. The latter approach consumes the time of the responsible department in handling requests and complaints, exhausts the company, and absorbs the brunt of customer frustration — because they’re on the front line. Which brings me to the next section.
Fairness in Employee Experience
I was struck by a story published on The Independent’s website at the end of October about an employee who presented a study to management showing that smoking employees enjoyed extra break time that non-smokers didn’t. In response, the company granted all non-smoking employees six additional days of leave on top of their regular vacation. This story reflects a sophistication and maturity of culture very different from the “if you don’t like it, leave” mindset.
The same applies to companies and their internal customers — employees. When a company conducts a salary benchmark and finds that its employees’ salaries are below the market average, it shouldn’t adjust salaries only for prospective new hires. It should start with existing employees, so they don’t feel cheated by a new hire receiving what they deserve while long-timers are denied that adjustment simply because they’re already under contract and have no leverage.
The same applies to bonuses: don’t distribute them only to employees of a particular nationality and skip others, or provide something to men but not women. The same goes for allowances and training courses. Fairness is a key requirement for ensuring a distinctive employee experience — and if you secure it for your employees, they will reciprocate and try to create a distinctive customer experience. Personally, I believe employee experience takes priority over customer experience.
It Is Not Fair
It is not fair to make hollow promises to your customers or employees.
It is not fair to accept misleading advertising to achieve short-term profitability.
It is not fair to set policies that serve the organization at the expense of the customer or employee.
It is not fair to apply discipline to some employees while letting others go because of their connections or influence.
It is not fair to use frontline employees as a human shield against angry customers caused by your inequitable or poorly thought-out decisions.
It is not fair for a customer to get service without waiting like everyone else because of wasta [connections]; the same applies to employees, when promotions happen based on relationships rather than merit and qualification.
And let’s suppose you, in good faith, instituted an unfair policy that ended up affecting your customers or employees and was discovered later — courage means owning the mistake and apologizing to everyone affected.
In Closing
If you want to be a pioneer in delivering a distinctive customer or employee experience, keep fairness front of mind in every transaction and interaction that takes place between you and your customers, or you and your employees.
Is what you offer your customers and employees actually fair? That’s the question I’ll leave you with until the next article.
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