The Importance Of Customer Satisfaction In Organisational Transformation

The volume of temporary labour has grown very fast during the last decades in Europe, as did the number of organizations with an intermediating role in relation to temporary (contingent) labour. All over the place there are small and large intermediaries trying to find the right persons for the vacant jobs in their portfolio. In the Netherlands this has lead to a more competitive market place for temporary employment agencies or flex companies and to the need 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 introduced a service excellence programme building on the following chain of excellence: good leadership gives enthusiastic and motivated employees, which gives satisfied customers and delivers good business results. In this paper the way to implement this program will be outlined. Also some first results of the implementation of the program will be presented. One of the interesting issues from a quality management perspective in relation to temporary employment agencies is the presence of two customer groups instead of just one. Besides the paying customers, who are hiring flex workers, there is another customer group, i.e. the flex workers (or contingent workers) themselves. What is the importance of flex workers, who are satisfied with their intermediary (flex company)? This is becoming more and more relevant as the agency aims at long-term relationships with its flex workers.In the empirical part of this paper we will present the analysis of data over three years (1998, 1999, and 2000) on the satisfaction of flex 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. The important issues related to the specific data of the flex workers? satisfaction surveys are:(a) the relationships between perceived satisfaction of flex workers and possible behavioural consequences, like making complaints and making use of other flex companies; (b) the stability of factor constructs over time that identify the major dimensions of satisfaction of flex workers; and (c) the satisfaction dynamics over time.