Dear Sambasivam,
Your individual thought perception is right and I appreciate this feeling, if you have the feeling that employee and customer should get equal care or treatment by the organization. In that case, I hope that your team members may be happy with you also.
But my thinking is tilted more towards employees, as in my views, if your employee is satisfied and happy, the customer would definitely go satisfied and happy with the goods and services of the organization.Contrarily, if your employee is not happy/ satisfied, definitely productivity of the employee would get retarded affecting the quality of goods and services of the organization. He would not be able to deliver goods and services properly to the customer on behalf of the organization. In that case both employee and the customer would be unhappy.
About your main point of the thread, "organizations are changing from "customer first, all others next TO employees first," to be frank, I differ with your views. In fact I found rarest organizations which think "employees first" OR even "customers and employees equal". Even in the rarest of the organizations, which may be believing "employees first", not only the individual managers, but also the top management is mostly unable to digest the theme. They still believe in the policy "must fire the employee to please the customers."
This very fact cannot be denied that you can fire the employee, even if he is right, on the other hand customer can fire or get you fired, even if he is wrong. The employee feels helpless when the question comes about the pleasing of some customer. In one company, I saw the plight of even a senior manager when, even as per the existing written rules of the organization, his subordinate manager had to snap services of a consumer on account of her default of payment of past dues the CMD called his boss to his chamber, fired him and directed him not only to get the services restored to her, but also personally beg for her pardon. Not even that he further directed him to invite the lady to join the CMD for a cup of tea. You can imagine, what embarrassing position would have been of that senior manager?
Another instance happened with me also during my service period, when working even in a separate entity, the same CMD telephoned my boss to get favor to some other customer and told him, if some rule of our organization hindered in the way, he would get even the rules modified from the HQ of my organization. I had to tell my boss frankly that he should not have expected me to direct my men to work unethically and if he wants some specific action to be done by me or my subordinates, let him intimate in writing and the same would appropriately be referred to the HQ for taking orders of the competent authority.
Thus, since the mentality of most of the manager is anti-employee, the dream of employee-customer on equal footing can never become true, what to say of employee first.