The power of a customer-first mentality

In this blog series, we share how each of our core beliefs drives our business and influence the way we interact with our clients and temporary workers. They serve as the foundation for achieving our mission of providing flexible staffing solutions that help people, organizations and communities succeed. Don’t miss our earlier posts on the power of people, dedication and responsiveness, and turning challenges into solutions.

Our fourth core belief is our focus on relationships, not transactions. By thinking long term, always doing the right thing and being accountable, we place trust above all else.

We put this belief into practice through our partnership approach with clients. Our team sees our role as one part staffing provider, one part advisor and one part problem solver. Filling roles doesn’t make us unique; our ability to help our customers improve their overall workforce and staffing processes does.

The BelFlex team is most successful when we get to know our clients and their unique challenges. In forming partnerships with customers vs. just filling orders, we can get a better sense of who they are and why they might be trying to solve a particular staffing problem a certain way. With years of experience, we can recommend alternative approaches that may have worked at a similar organization. The result is more innovative workforce solutions.

Here’s an example of how BelFlex’s partnership model allows the company to put clients first in any situation. A new customer turned to BelFlex for help both attracting and retaining workers. The strategy BelFlex developed included the following tactics.

• Using its market-specific rate knowledge, BelFlex encouraged the client to increase its rates slightly to attract better quality workers.
• Together with the client, BelFlex created a better onboarding program that would increase retention and worker performance.
• The BelFlex team put in place a retention program, where they take a portion of their profit to create opportunities to engage with workers, including hosting appreciation days, awarding attendance bonuses and more.

The result? The client was able to reduce the size of its temporary workforce by 40%, simply by finding, training—and keeping—the right workers. While this strategy meant that BelFlex also reduced its own opportunities to find work for its temporary labor pool, the client was so pleased that they brought on BelFlex to staff another one of its facilities.

How did this customer hear about BelFlex? Through its temporary workers. After conducting a survey, the client found that many of its workers validated BelFlex’s reputation for being fair and keeping workers’ best interests in mind.

So it’s not surprising that our approach is nearly identical when we partner with job seekers. We all understand the old adage; never judge a book by its cover, and it very much applies to workers. It’s the responsibility of a staffing provider to get a feel for each individual’s work style, strengths and weaknesses.

A partnership mentality can mean the difference between simply meeting staffing expectations and surpassing them in a way that creates an entirely new idea of success.

This is the fourth post in a series on BelFlex’s five core beliefs. Read the first, second and third installments, and follow along in the weeks to come as we explore our remaining belief here on the blog.