Practical Leadership - ESI before CSI

ESI = Employee Satisfaction Index = How satisfied your employee is

CSI = Customer Satisfaction Index = How satisfied a customer is with your service / product

I had had the unique chance of working with Engineering as well as Support teams where CSI was fairly low as in the mid 20's or lower 30's. There were real issues that needed to be dealt with like

1) Processes too inefficient or too dependent on a single person / single team.

2) Lack of Product knowledge

3) Lack of support from Account Teams

4) Incorrectly set Customer expectations

5) Too little resources resulting in too much work

etc

but one area that would almost always get overlooked was how satisfied the Employee was.

The aspects that got invariably missed out were

Right fitment of the Role

Availability of the right resources

Right Mentors

Acting on Feedback from the team.

Conflict Management

Basic concerns about compensation and allowances

Quality of work (reducing monotonous work)

Good Leaders

Vision of the product

There were instances where despite a lot of changes teams would not go beyond 40% on the CSI score's consistently till the ESI aspects were taken care of. > 70% CSI was very much achievable in most cases after taking care of the ESI concerns.

Hence low CSI could very well be a symptom but the Root Cause could very well be low ESI. 

Moral of the Story: Fix the right problems to get the right results.