The Importance of Customer Satisfaction in Organisational Transformation

Abstract

The volume of temporary labour has grown very fast during the last decades inEurope, as did the number of organizations with an intermediating role inrelation to temporary (contingent) labour. All over the place there are smalland large intermediaries trying to find the right persons for the vacant jobsin their portfolio. In the Netherlands this has lead to a more competitivemarket place for temporary employment agencies or flex companies and to theneed to find new ways of developing competitive advantage. A large temporary employment agency in the Netherlands, wants to develop"experience quality" in its services in Europe. This agency has introduceda service excellence programme building on the following chain of excellence:good leadership gives enthusiastic and motivated employees, which givessatisfied customers and delivers good business results. In this paper the way toimplement this program will be outlined. Also some first results of theimplementation of the program will be presented. One of the interestingissues from a quality management perspective in relation to temporary employmentagencies is the presence of two customer groups instead of just one. Besides thepaying customers, who are hiring flex workers, there is another customer group,i.e. the flex workers (or contingent workers) themselves. What is the importanceof flex workers, who are satisfied with their intermediary (flex company)? Thisis becoming more and more relevant as the agency aims at long-term relationshipswith its flex workers.In the empirical part of this paper we will present theanalysis of data over three years (1998, 1999, and 2000) on the satisfaction offlex workers in the context of the flex company?s service excellence programme,as an example of the use of measurements in relation to the change process. Theimportant issues related to the specific data of the flex workers? satisfactionsurveys are:(a) the relationships between perceived satisfaction of flex workersand possible behavioural consequences, like making complaints and making use ofother flex companies; (b) the stability of factor constructs over time thatidentify the major dimensions of satisfaction of flex workers; and (c) thesatisfaction dynamics over time.

Keywords: leadership, customer satisfaction, organisational change, temporary employment agencies

JEL Classification: M, M10, L2, M12