Your business has embraced placing customer service excellence at the heart of everything it does. It’s part of your foundations. You understand that to provide customer service excellence; your customers need to feel loved, appreciated and rewarded.
However, what some companies forget in this happy equation is that employees providing customer service excellence need to feel loved, appreciated and rewarded too.
How? By fostering a service excellence culture through your employee engagement strategy.
At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, we believe that an engaged workforce is essential if you want your organisation to achieve customer service excellence.
What’s a Service Excellence Culture?
It’s a workplace environment and culture in which employees provide excellent and consistent customer service. Another way of putting it is to say that it’s a way of giving value to your customers through high levels of service.
Remember that acquiring new customers costs five times as much as it does to keep existing ones, and recruiting new employees costs up to £30,000 per employee.
What’s Employee Engagement?
There’s no one set definition. We believe that it’s how an employee is invested – not only in the specifics of their job but also in your brand, mission and values. They bring motivation, energy and commitment to their role and strive to do the best they can.
Jo Causon, Chief Executive of the Institute of Customer Service, defines it as ‘the psychological and emotional state which is expressed in employee behaviour – the focus, effort, commitment, and motivation that they apply in performing their job.’
At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, we work collaboratively with brands to help them achieve customer service excellence by creating a bespoke employee engagement strategy.
So, how can your employee engagement lead to customer service excellence?
Align Your Organisation
If everyone in your business shares the same vision, mission and values through a strategic culture of leadership, inclusivity, and communication, you have organisational alignment. If all your teams have a shared sense of purpose both strategically and operationally, they will be more productive, engaged and more motivated to provide customer service excellence.
Lead By Example
Leaders and managers who demonstrate customer-focused behaviours are teaching their team’s positive behaviours and ways of working. By the same turn, leaders and managers can demonstrate those same behaviours towards their teams to better engage them at work.
SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL works with large and small companies to help them break down barriers between leaders and teams, so they are all working towards the same end goal.
Training Is Not Enough
Training your teams on customer service excellence and your brand’s message at onboarding is just one step towards securing employee engagement. Of course, you need to equip your employees with the skills they need to provide excellence.
However, you must sustain those skills by developing a company-wide culture where employees understand the part they play in keeping the customer happy and the impact they have on the customer.
Implement a regular engagement program to add value for customers and employees alike. For example:
- Allow employees to meet customers and hear open and honest comments.
- Offer good career progression and commensurate rates of pay, job security and benefits.
- Define employee roles clearly, so people feel empowered, trusted and independent enough to make decisions
- Instil an established structure by which employees have a voice and can see how they influence decision making
- Incorporate measurable customer service excellence objectives into your appraisal/performance management processes
- Incorporate measurable employee engagement surveys into your culture. You can’t improve engagement levels unless you measure the psychological temperature of your teams.
- Live a management culture that’s open and supportive.
Help employees to understand the importance of providing excellent service to internal colleagues
If employees are engaged and customer-oriented, this will positively impact your customer experience. Engaged employees interact more positively with customers, giving them a more rewarding journey with your brand.
Unconvinced? Companies whose employees are engaged, see around 233% more customer loyalty.
Before We Go
At SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL, we’ve learnt through our work with multiple customer-centric organisations that the companies who outperform their competitors do so because they’ve worked hard to create a culture of service excellence and employee engagement.
Talk to us today about how we can help you achieve excellence.