Company: FuturePeople Web Address: www.futurepeople.com.au Address: Head Office: Level 4, 228 Pitt St, Sydney Telephone: (+612) 9024 2900
Most Inovative Recruitment Firm - Australia
FuturePeople Recruitment FuturePeople is a specialist consultancy focused on helping organisations that are serious about customer engagement. They spoke to us about their unique recruitment process and more.
From our experience, companies with loyal customers grow faster, are more profitable and provide significantly higher shareholder returns. Similary, companies with engaged staff have 56% higher customer loyalty. This customer engagement happens on the front line of organisations, and involves people interacting with people, solving problems for customers and providing solutions. At futurepeople we specialise in helping organisations find and develop front line employees who are highly engaged and emotionally intelligent. We have a 13 year track record as partner to the majority of Australia’s leading organisations; spanning banking, insurance, FMCG, health and government. The Australian recruitment industry is highly commoditised and many organisations still don’t recognize the importance of investing in recruiting and developing the right people. We have had to invest heavily in research to demonstrate the link between highly engaged employees on the frontline and customer engagement. Throughout the years, FuturePeople has evolved from being a recruitment agency to being a human capital partner. We provide consulting services to assist organisations in recruiting and developing the right staff to serve their customers. We have invested heavily in research to provide value to organisations who are serious about customer engagement. A primary example is our emotional intelligence (EI) research study looking at the relationship between EI on the front line and customer engagement. This has enabled us to develop an EI profile specific to Australian contact centres for recruitment and training purposes. Our future-proofing strategy involves educating organisations of the importance of investing in the front line to deliver customer advocacy. We will continue to evolve our training
offerings to support these employees in developing the skills required in the ‘new world’ of digitalisation and increased customer expectations. Our trademarked FutureFit methodology is an eight step process focused on getting psychologically fit for front line customer facing roles. It has been developed in collaboration with Australian employers and employees analysing the attributes of high performing people and attrition trends. FutureFit evaluates candidates against an emotional intelligence (EI) profile which has been developed based on our industry research on the role of EI on the front line in customer experience and employee engagement. We focus on helping organisations find, select and engage ‘emotionally intelligent brand advocates’ on their front line. Our ‘Heartonomics TM’ philosophy is about the economic value of how we make people feel: our employees and our customers. When customers are highly engaged they do the selling for us by acting as brand advocates. It’s not possible to have engaged customers without engaged employees hence we focus on our own employee engagement to ensure our people are emotionally invested in creating genuine value for our customers. At FuturePeople,we define culture as ‘values in action’ hence we focus on recruiting staff to serve our customers who share our values as an organisation so that it shows up in the right behaviour. Emotionally intelligent behaviour is a key foundation for our culture, and relates to emotional awareness of self and others to develop effective relationships built on trust. Our specialisation in the front line and the complete solution we offer goes beyond simply recruiting the right people. Recruitment is only the first step in driving
32 Corporate Vision Recruitment Awards 2015
customer engagement through people. Once recruited the front line need to be in a culture that drives their continued engagement; a culture of development and effective leadership. We provide organisations with a range of interventions to achieve this. A key element of our differentiation is the research we have invested in relating to emotional intelligence in recruitment and engagement of the front line and the value this has offered to our clients. Providing the best service is an ongoing process and we are always adapting to the myriad changes occuring in our sectors. In the recruitment industry, there is significant cost pressure, and organisations wanting to pay less for more. In our industry of specialisation – customer experience – it has been digital disruption: the industry now needs to recruit front line employees who are digitally competent and can interact with customers effectively across multiple channels – email, social, chat etc. Organisations continuing to harness technology to automate customer service via ‘self service’ channels are likely to continue to have the biggest impact on our industry. The opportunity for us lies in educating organisations on the importance of having a much higher skilled person on the front line to solve problems for customers when the limits of self service technology have been reached. The challenge lies in connecting C level executives in organisations to what’s happening with their customers on the frontline and getting their buy in on the importance of investing here. Innovation is part of our DNA at FuturePeople, and we invest heavily in industry research and thought leadership to drive innovation in our organisation and for our clients. So to have it formally recognised with this award is a great testament to the the effort that we apply here.