Home topics workplace hr-and-staff Managing Staff Managing Managing employee – customer relations Adeline Teoh June 17, 2008 Scientist and author D r John Fleming shares his views on getting the most out of the employee-customer encounter. “Quality” is easy to measure and manage in some contexts, and extremely difficult in others. Businesspeople have a pretty good idea how to judge the manufacturing process that yields a snazzy new handheld device, for example. But what about the retail employee’s attempts to sell the gadget? Or the call centre employee’s effort to help the customer navigate its eccentricities? Businesses, including small and medium-sized businesses in Australia, aren’t especially good at measuring and managing the quality of those processes – in particular the engagement of employees and customers at all levels of the business. Yet it’s essential that organisations learn to measure and manage quality in all kinds of business settings. In manufacturing, value is created on the factory floor. In sales and service organisations, and in many professional service firms, value is created when an employee interacts with a customer. Indeed, the employee-customer encounter is the floor of sales and services. If these organisations are going to achieve meaningful operational and financial improvements, the employee-customer encounter must be managed with great care. Quality improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma are extremely useful in manufacturing contexts, where ingredients with predictable properties are repeatedly combined in the same ways, but they are less useful when it comes to the employee-customer encounter, with its volatile