For more than a decade industry pundits have talked about the synergies between managing the customer relationship lifecycle and the employee relationship lifecycle. Essentially, we use strategies and tools to acquire, manage, retain and grow relationships with our customers whether they are external or internal to our organization.
Over the years HR has effectively adopted and - - in some cases improved - - many customer-facing strategies and technologies from CRM [candidate relationship management] to employment branding - - to predictive analytics on such critical issues as churn [employee turnover projections based on key attributes].
Many of the clients I have worked with over the years have 10’s if not 100’s of discrete applications and service providers within their Human Capital Management (HCM) architecture to fulfill global service delivery and feature innovation requirements. But despite the fact our HCM footprint has become increasingly global, ‘front-office’ and end-user driven; and even though the Talent Management suite has become a strategic business tool, offering the promise of driving talent pipeline development, increased productivity, and employee engagement, I fail to see HR’s consistent adoption of a product management-like approach to its HCM assets. Product management [or perhaps better coined, HCM portfolio management] requires holistic lifecycle strategies across the HCM inventory - - from concept to design, development, deployment, growth, maintenance and, ultimately, retirement.
On the market-facing side of an organization, I have found that the absence of a product management philosophy and discipline creates focus on the technology instead of the customers and is often deployed along technology lines rather than in ways that benefit the customer. Instead of talking about the company and its products, the successful product manager talks about customers and their problems; a product manager is the voice of the market full of customers.* An HR product manager [or program manager] is the voice of its executives, managers, employees and other stakeholders.
In KI’s recent ‘Assessing Service Delivery in Human Capital Study’ which was conducted in collaboration with IHRIM, we found that less than 10% of participants believe their employees are highly satisfied with their HR technology solutions. Now, if a customer satisfaction survey yielded those same results, what do you think the consequences would be?
Between the constant emergence of new technologies and provider services--and the realization that the primary users of these solutions are diverse, multi-generational employees with varying skill levels and needs, it appears we have reached a time in our evolution to adopt not only the philosophies of customer relationship management, but also the methodologies and discipline required to sustain an efficient delivery system while providing an exceptional customer experience that, in turn, drives tangible improvements and financial growth.
What will it take to infuse the right skills, experience and rigor to adopt a “product management and marketing” approach to HCM?
* Source: The Strategic Role of Product Management. Steve Johnson. Pragmatic Marketing.