Employees play a pivotal role in building customer trust, confidence, and loyalty. Every team member has an opportunity to contribute to creating a compelling customer experience, or one that fails to deliver on your brand promise.
Few would argue that staff on the front line greatly influence the customer experience, but all employees play a role in reinforcing your company’s commitment to the customer. Here are seven ways you can improve an employee's impact on the customer experience:
- Set clear expectations and hold employees accountable to a high standard of service
- Recognize success, both on a company and individual employee level
- Understand the factors that contribute to employee turnover
- Provide ongoing coaching, training, and education
- Track performance
- Communicate effectively
- Empower employees
Achieving Higher Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Consider each touchpoint along your customer lifecycle. It begins when the customer first hears about your organization and continues as long as the company uses or considers your products or services.
Think about the people who support each interaction's tools, processes, data, systems, communication, etc.. It’s easy to see how nearly every employee plays a part in customer experience with your company.
Improving the Customer Experience
To ensure employees continuously focus on improving the customer experience, your customer-centric management philosophy must flow down forcefully from senior leadership through middle management and directly to employees.
A clear and cohesive vision communicates to employees that the customer experience is not an isolated initiative or expectation for them alone but that the entire organization is focused on building customer loyalty. Our recommendation:
Set clear expectations and hold employees accountable to a high standard of service
Reinforce how they contribute to satisfying customers and thus generating profits.
Recognize success, both on a company and individual employee level
When an employee does something extraordinary, use it as an opportunity to celebrate the achievement. A great way to keep your finger on the pulse of this is through customer satisfaction surveys, onboarding surveys, and net promoter surveys.
Understand the factors that contribute to employee turnover
Uncover the root cause of employee frustrations so they can be quickly addressed. To accomplish this, we recommend doing employee satisfaction surveys, employee engagement surveys, employee opinion surveys, inderderpatramental surveys, and employee net promoter surveys.
Provide ongoing coaching, training, and education
Give employees the tools to make decisions that are beneficial for the company and each individual customer.
Track performance
Use metrics to measure and track both customer and employee satisfaction and retention.
Communicate effectively
Keep your employees ‘in the loop’ when you implement changes based on their feedback.
Empower employees
Give them the knowledge and resources to be successful, and your customers will have a better experience.
All employees must know that customer loyalty is paramount and that customer-oriented goals should guide their actions and behaviors. Addressing the points above will help embed these values in your organizational DNA, setting the tone for a customer-oriented culture.