Match employees to target customers

Every business interaction is ultimately between two people – an employee and customer, or the employee who designs the customer interface and that customer. Most high-performance business relationships are heavily influenced by emotional compatibility.

Therefore, the employee selection process should begin with carefully selecting employees who will first best match the targeted customers, then the company. Although we lack understanding of the emotional state of the customer at the beginning of an interaction, it is possible to hire for and then match emotional predispositions of employees, e.g. sales, service to particular customers. This entails matching employee human attributes with customer human attributes. After a firm segments their customers by human need, it can then match the emotional attributes of employees to emotional attributes of customers. One of the ways to accomplish this is through applying classic personality typing during employee screening. The firm can then hire ‘‘personalities’’ who best match how the firm delivers its value to a certain segment of customers.

When employee and customer human attributes are not matched, it is stressful to the employee and increases the chance that the customer will not be satisfied. In many cases, management will end up chastising the employee for apparent performance shortcomings when in fact it is simply a mismatch of emotional attributes between employee and customer. Matching can be accomplished by creating customer needs profiles and employee needs profiles for particular customer ‘‘need’’ segments and employee roles respectively. The critical component of matching employee to customer is the first focus on what emotional end state the customer desires; next is hiring employees whose natural ability is to create such an end state. This goes far beyond the conventional job description of roles and tasks. When customer/employee emotional matching is embedded into core hiring practices, not only does customer and employee fulfillment increase but so does employee efficiency and effectiveness.

Ultimately, employees’ ability to fulfill customers is determined by their inherent human characteristics. Below is a comparative table of people with high self-esteem versus low self-esteem illustrating this principle.

Employees with high self-esteem are:

1 Likely to think well of others.

2 Expect to be accepted by others.

3 Evaluate their own performance more favorably than people with low self-esteem.

4 Perform well when being watched: not afraid of others’ reactions.

5 Work harder for people who demand high standards of performance.

6 Inclined to feel comfortable with others they view as superior in some way.

7 Able to defend themselves against negative comments of others.

Employees with low self-esteem are:

1 Likely to disapprove of others.

2 Expect to be rejected by others.

3 Evaluate their own performance less favorably than people with high self-esteem.

4 Perform poorly when being watched: sensitive to possible negative reaction.

5 Work harder for undemanding, less critical people.

6 Feel threatened by people they view as superior in some way.

7 Have difficulty defending themselves against others’ negative comments; more easily influenced.

(Adapted from Don E. Hamachek, Encounters with the Self, 2nd edn (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982), pp. 3–5)

Source : Costumers are People, The Human touch. John Mckean 2002

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