Author: Sumit Shukla
In my 20 years of corporate journey, I have had the privilege of witnessing an entire lifetime of offerings the corporate life can present. Boom Time, Multiple Recessions, Financial Crisis, Financial Growth, Customers Addition, Customers Attrition, Employees Addition and Growth,Employees Attrition, Good Reviews or Bad Reviews, Bull Run or Bear Run. You name it, and I have witnessed it; such is the bane and blessing of the corporate life and especially the entrepreneur life.
However, one thing that has struck me always is the search of that formula in the ladder that works in the best interest of life and aims at success always. Being a student of Marketing, Technology and Law, I have come across a many of Es and Ps and Cs for customer attraction, sales and retention but when applied in real life there is a gap in all of them.
What applies at one instance does not necessarily means that it will be true for another instance. By reading through most of the laws of marketing or corporate strategies, it is best to conclude that most of the strategies are derived based on the post-execution stage rather than pre-execution stage. Also, most of the strategies are isolated with each other in the long run and then can be deduced as best possible of the lot. This kept me awake many times when we tried to implement various theories in the best interest of our organization and to climb the ladder of success in the corporate world.
I have always been fascinated to study the connection between happiness of the employees in association with the satisfaction of the customers. Successful customer centric organizations have large number of happy employees as well. Trying to disturb the balance between happiness of employees and satisfaction of customers is like introducing entropy in a perfect equilibrium of systems. Both the strategies need to work in balance and go hand in hand. However, it is difficult to decide which came first here. Satisfied customer means happy employees or happy employees mean satisfied customers. I am sure that latter makes more sense as happy employees mean better work and better quality produced for the requirements of the customer. A happy employee would pay more attention to the needs of the customer, liaison between teams would be better and this would lead to the better satisfaction of the customer.
In the quest of making this study a simple deduction, the theory of 5Cs of corporate success has evolved. This theory can be studied from both the sides with ease. One side is from the employee side and the other side, as always, is the customer side. 5Cs working in close coordination with each other and not willing to be major contributing factor in Silo eliminates the best possible fit theory in which majority will suffice. The working of 5Cs for success is all at one or none and therefore has served us much better from other theories in making an environment best suited for growth and evolving better corporate strategies.
I have tried to elaborate this concept of 5Cs of corporate success from all major branches or divisions of a corporate structure. This includes
- Employees
- Customers
Constituents of 5Cs in theory
5Cs of Corporate Success theory consists of the following inseparable elements
- Confidence
- Character
- Collaboration
- Compassion
- Customers
Before I delve into larger details on how this theory helps create the corporate success methods, let’s observe through a diagrammatic help on how these elements are woven together.
Let us deep dive to understand the meaning of each constituent element of the theory to be observed and understood in the right manner.
- Confidence
- Be confident in your approach. Try to be aware of the thin line between confidence and over confidence and always be on the side of confidence.
- Be confident of your abilities that you can deliver the best results to your customers.
- Be confident of your understanding and do not hesitate in getting clarifications for the requirements that are being presented.
- Character
- The trait of character is inclusive of Physical attributes, technical attributes and functional attributes related to the duties involved in the profile.
- Make your character strong by taking ownership of the work being assigned to you.
- A strong character helps in assuming clear responsibilities within the team members and with the customer.
- A strong character helps in generating trust and respect with ease among the fellows and/or customers.
- Collaboration
- Collaboration between departments to improve communication and remove any confusions.
- Collaboration between Internal Teams to make best use of information available
with each other - Intra Team Collaboration to ensure better coordination between team members and manage the delivery schedules properly
- Compassion
- Compassionate to the needs of the Team members; be it learning needs, or the project load needs or the functional needs.
- Compassionate to the needs of the Customers; be it their functional needs, or
- Compassionate to the learning abilities of the members to make them grow along and not slow down one’s own pace
- Compassionate to the environmental needs of the profession
- Customers
- Customer is the King of any business
- Understanding the needs of customer business helps in customer satisfaction
- Increased customer satisfaction leads to better business for the organization
Applying 5Cs for Happy Employees
Application of 5Cs is very easy for the happiness of the employees. Once the Employees have Confidence to build strong Characters among themselves, in order to build a better Collaboration and become Compassionate for the needs of the team members to serve a better quality product to the Customers, the happiness index of the employees start rising which leads to the better satisfaction of the Customer Deliveries of the project leading to Successful Organization Strategies.
Applying 5Cs for Satisfied Customers
The formula for a satisfied Customer is easy to deduce by having employees show their Strong Character and deal with the Customers with increased Confidence and Compassion to their requirements, the Collaboration would increase for better and expected deliveries of the project.
Conclusion
It is a well-established fact in the corporate strategy world that
Satisfied Customer => Increased Business
Increased Business => Better Facilities
Better Facilities => Happy Employees
Happy Employees + Satisfied Customer => SUCCESS
No theory can well establish a single rule of success for all. The concept of 5Cs of corporate success is one derived from practical experience over the corporate journey. The concept relies on the simple facts making employees responsible and owners of the task to deliver the best quality product to the customers. The joy of a successful project delivery matched with the satisfaction of the customers has been the key of long and successful project associations with the customers that help companies grow in the long run up to their established plans. This article is the first part of a much larger concept that will involve all related aspects of building up to the theory.
Disclaimer : The evolution of theory of 5Cs of Corporate Success is based on the personal experience and does not wish to denigrate any established theory of business and corporate strategies. The idea behind this theory is to evolve a model of customer satisfaction which in turn makes employees of an organization happier and more satisfied. The author declares that the content of this document have been written in original by him and does not want to subscribe to any established thought process in the industry and hence seeks to declare that any resemblance to the theory to any existing similar theory prior to this date of 15th July 2020 is purely co-incidental. Any resemblance to the theory post 15th July 2020 will be a work of reproduction of this article by the external party for which the author is not responsible and originality of this article cannot be challenged in any manner in that case.
