By Jay Malin, Managing Director & Joanne Fletcher, Consultant
It is well accepted that happy customers translate positively to a business’s bottom line. Customers are satisfied when they receive a good product with good support, on time. Successful companies devote significant time to ensuring they have systems in place to support effective design, efficient delivery and satisfying problem solving. While these systems must be in place, they are merely the enabling foundation for an often-overlooked element important for customer satisfaction: employee satisfaction.
In spite of numerous self-service technologies such as web, IVR and chat bot, many touchpoints your customer have with your business starts with one of your employees. Therefore the work environment and tools you offer make a difference in how people feel about your company, their job, and themselves. Allowing employees to use their judgment, encouraging responsibility and decision making, and providing tools to help them do their job better helps employees feel valued and appreciated.
Research supports that employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are an unending loop. They feed on each other and ultimately lead to the kind of loyalty that supports your organization stability and growth.
Customer satisfaction is enhanced today with new technologies that allow you to communicate with customers in more and varied ways.
– Granting convenient self-service access to information with options for conducting business and completing transactions at times convenient for them.
– Providing proactive and targeted communications that anticipate their individual needs and helps them manage their time.
– Enabling immediate and responsive access to someone who has the information and authority to help them with any issue or concern.
So how do these same tools help support employee satisfaction as well?
– Effective self-service options means fewer calls to the call center and higher levels of productivity for your employees. The impact is threefold. One, employees only deal with the more complex issues requiring keen knowledge, the ability to relate, and thoughtful problem solving and decision making. Two, fewer calls presents an opportunity for cross-training or other growth opportunities. Three, employees are free to develop new business relationships.
– Offering training, and empowering your employees via next-gen channels and tools such as two-way text, social chat, and artificial intelligence help them interact with customers and respond to inquiries knowledgeably and swiftly. Further, it allows your employees to gain specialization and proactively serve as a premier customer concierge and not just an informational source.
These tools contribute to an employees’ sense of well-being, value, and importance. This translates to a workforce prepared and supported to provide responsive, helpful, and respectful service. These are crucial elements in acquiring and maintaining employee and customer loyalty especially in today’s tight labor market.
AGENT511’s REACH Preference platform delivers proactive communications and facilitates two-way interactivity that maximizes customer satisfaction by offering relevant, instant access to information. By leveraging leading-edge tools like REACH, organizations not only fulfill their promises to customers but to employees as well by empowering their workforce and creating more meaningful customer interactions.