Even as you plan your talent management strategy for FY 2024, you already know this: While the general recruitment outlook remains positive, we probably won’t see the same aggressive hiring drives we’ve witnessed over the past two years.
While this is good news for those who’ve been pressed on time-to-hire and time-to-fill metrics, the shift calls for prioritizing relationships to unlock more value. Gig workers are playing an even larger role in the workforce, and supporting their contracts and other logistics requires a different kind of service from HR teams. In this promising but challenging business environment, company leaders want to see more value from hiring campaigns, existing hires, and vendor partners.
As HR leaders add these business imperatives to an already-full slate of challenges, something has to give. Do any of these sound familiar?
- Candidates want to work with companies that align with their sense of purpose and are willing to turn down offers for the same reason
- Retaining top gig workers at negotiated costs is no longer easy
- Vendor partner firms prefer working with clients who are less cost-conscious and willing to sign longer-term contracts
- Employee stress is at an all-time high in the post-pandemic work environment and a majority of the world’s employees are quiet quitting
- Change fatigue is a physical reality and productivity barrier across industries, impacting even top talent
The good news: You can impact CX
As an HR leader, it can certainly be stressful to reflect that you have little control over external economic conditions and fast-evolving stakeholder expectations, among other challenges. While this is true, there is more to this narrative: You can influence the experience of your customers, ranging from potential hires and employees to gig workers and vendor partners. While HR professionals are generally seen as focused on EX (employee experience), the customer experience (CX) you provide is critical, too.
In simple terms, while global phenomena in business, tech, geopolitical events, and climate change will continue to have a hold over talent and partner sentiment, you can influence the narrative by shaping core CX drivers. This calls for you to first understand their deeper truths beyond contract commitments. You must go past transactional interactions and metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) to more deeply understand the experiences of your most important audiences. Candidate feedback surveys, for example, can offer important insights into the hiring process. Voice of the Customer studies are often focused on “paying customers”, but listening to the voices of potential and new employees can be very helpful in building relationships and delivering experiences that align with fast-evolving stakeholder priorities.
Are you worried that despite such insights, you might fall short of the soft skills needed to forge deeper, enduring bonds? This is precisely where AI and automation can make a difference, helping you to engage your customers effectively without straining your resources with end-to-end CX management. Top talent managers are using AI and automation to transform the CX for employees, gig workers, and vendor partners. The employee engagement market alone is expected to grow at a stunning compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17% by 2030.
The shift to tech for stakeholder management
As the link between enhanced CX, performance, and revenue becomes clearer, top talent managers are no longer limiting tech investments to streamline workflows and processes to impact CX. In the new environment, they are using AI and tech to directly drive integrated communication, high-value engagement, and powerful relationships.
They are moving away from generic, one-size-fits-all surveys and feedback programs to adopt fluid, omnichannel listening. By taking a cue from this approach, you can collect timely feedback across channels and touchpoints, and integrate it with your existing talent management systems to effectively show you care.
Top talent, be it vendors, employees, or gig workers, equates action with intent. This calls for you to not just collect CX-focused data across platforms and journeys but also arrive at prompt, high-value analytics that informs your interactions. By using AI for big data computing and technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) for sentiment analysis, CX management platforms are redefining customer experience analytics. Know high-impact drivers, access churn signals, predict future needs, and empower all teams with dashboard-based analytics.
At a larger level, always have a pulse on journeys even when your customers are spread across geographies or don’t have direct frequent interactions with post the onboarding stage. Leverage customer journey management tools to arrive at priority action points without losing time; resolve hidden friction and maximize delight with talent customers by prompting busy managers.
The future of CX for result-oriented talent leaders
As CX becomes a business imperative, every team, including yours, must align to this pivot. It is the only way you can attract the best industry talent and get them to deliver optimum performance irrespective of your relationship model. As a talent leader, you must also be tactical about handling talent in the context of continuous change management. These are top factors why irrespective of customer-base sizes, effective talent leaders will invest in end-to-end CX management.
The good news is that industry-focused platforms leverage AI and automation to arrive at solutions that speak human. Deep but simple-to-understand metrics, intuitive drag-and-drop tools, and a front-end experience that delights your customers are at the core of such platform design. This ensures that CX management doesn’t become a cost center for your team, even when you are just starting out. Invest, scale, and watch CX transform more than just employer branding and negotiation power with SogoCX; let AI and automation-led CX management unlock enhanced talent performance and business growth in a highly competitive talent environment.
Ready to learn how peers in the industry are redefining CX to forge deeper relationships? Explore our customer stories!
