Eating is dead simple.
So is sleeping. Very simple, straight forward thing. You lay on the bed, you close your eyes, and that’s all you need to do (insomnia episodes aside).

If you think about it, nature made the most critical processes the simplest things on earth. Not only were they made so intuitive so users, human beings, don’t even need to think about how to perform each of these activities. It goes beyond that, to the extreme that not a single user-guide was ever needed. Not at all.

How critical are HR processes to the life-contuinity of a business? Yes: recruiting the right talent, assessing employees´ performance and rewarding them subsequently seem to be a fairly critical thing with a profound impact on the profit of businesses.

You need therefore all your HR community members to understand the process and to execute it in the most efficient way. Speaking about efficiency, there’s something called automation: that’s when you decide you can’t afford having your HR teams running their day to day duties on paper in 2014. That´s when you get things automated. There you are, a cool company.

You tell me if it´s me, but I have always been pleased with the simplicity of Gmail. Any average website seems to be fairly usable without having to read a user-guide prior to using it. How about your Black-Berry, iPhone or iPad. Think of your car. It’s got a user-guide but I bet you never needed to read it. That’s because your car is just intuitive. It behaves the way you expect it to behave. Even if you own the fanciest car in the block, fully equiped with every sort of option and feature, you will still be able to use its features without the need of assisting to a training session, without having to call any Service Desk at all.

Don’t Make Me Think

Simple, intuitive things are easy to use. Easy to love. The secret recipe for the success of any solution implementation, HR solutions included, is to deliver a totally simple, user-friendly solution. Make it tricky, complicated, not so obvious and you’ll have most of your potential users unhappy. Doesn’t matter how many functionalities you’re bringing with your new, best in class HR solution, doesn’t matter the business pain-points you’re solving with it, if it’s complicated to use, it won’t be used. Steve Krug explains it very well in his “Don’t Make Me Think” book.

The Pursuit of Simplicity

If a human being is able to land on the moon and to invent auto-driven cars, then building “very simple” HR solutions should not be that big deal. Simplicity though is not being a priority, yet, for the big players in the HR solutions arena. The fashion now is to sell accessible solutions, filled with features, built-up in the cloud. The paradigm of HR solutions usage is changing however: the scope of users is shifting from only HR professionals to all staff population (with Talent Management solutions for processes like Recruitment or Performance); the IT/IS consciousness of the population is increasing; new devices are popping-up in the landscape forcing the HR solutions providers to adapt their products to different platforms. Analytics have now the ability to demonstrate that the user is spending 80% of their time using only 20% of the features and functionalities (heck, we landed on the moon, we should be able to track this).

All these are factors the HR solutions “factories” just can’t ignore. Simplicity is the boarding pass to leading the HR solutions market of the future.

Make it simple and everyone will love it.

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It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.

It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

Quote from Charles Darwin

Customer Service, that small office

There is no general agreement regarding where exactly is the Customer Care department to be located within a company. There is a tendency to have it generally hosted in Sales and Marketing, but a big number of companies have their Customer Service unit reporting to Operations. The reason behind both choices is merely the company’s own perspective.

On the other hand, Customer Care is, in most of the cases, the only department that apparently “cares” about the customer: usually Sales and Marketing targets are related to revenue; Project Office’s main concern is to deliver their projects within the estimated timeframe, cost and quality; while other functions (Finance, Buildings & Facilities, HR, Billing, etc.) have their own KPI’s, mostly related to their own businesses, which is understandable but then only one small part of the organization is seeking the customer’s satisfaction. For the rest of units and functions customer satisfaction is just something they shouldn’t care about, since it seems like it’s not affecting them at all.

Well, it does.

Hold on, how does the Customer Satisfaction affect my area?

The customer satisfaction pursuit leads nowhere if it’s not a general habit in the organization as a whole. This happens making people aware of the necessity of contibuting somehow in the customer satisfaction and designing a global strategy where all units realize their relationship towards the Customer. If we believe we are adding certain weight onto the value chain, customer care has to be therefore among our top priorities as the only “value” that matters is the one realized and acknowledged by the customer.

Successful Example of a 360º Customer Focus

There are examples of companies from different sectors that master the Customer Culture in a very smart way. The online-retail giant Amazon.com for instance was classified last year top #1 best company for customer service because as a first step they focus their core business on what the customer wants, and then they start crafting and shaping the rest of their business processes based upon that starting point.

This leads me to Bob Thompson’s article: “What makes customer-focused companies different?” where 3 clear elements are identified as pillars of a successful customer-focused organization:

1. Leadership
2. Infrastructure
3. Action

To conclude, Customer Care is not a department. It’s a strategy, a “core”, a set of behaviors, a culture.

Customer-oriented organizations feel continuously indebted towards their customers and seek their satisfaction.