The quality of your employees in a customer-facing environment plays a crucial role in determining market success and financial performance.
Your frontline employees are vital for delivering service excellence and maintaining competitive advantage. Employees also play a key role in anticipating the customer’s needs, customising service delivery and building personalised relationships.
Decades of research proves that employee happiness raises nearly every business outcome.
So why wouldn’t you invest resources into your employees?
It’s important to ask: is your business adopting a Cycle of Failure or a Cycle of Success?
The Cycle of Failure captures the implications of management strategies affecting failures with employees, which then has an effect on customers. Employee failure is often due to too little investment in employee training and selection, which generates bored employees who lack the ability to respond and engage with customers.
To ensure greater customer satisfaction and highly skilled, personable employees it is vital that your business implement a Cycle of Success. This includes focusing time on recruitment, intensive training and having attractive pay and benefits. Implementing broadened job descriptions with empowerment practices inspire your front-line staff. This lowers employee turnover and results in regular customers who respond to service continuity with loyalty to your business. With greater customer loyalty, profit margins will increase. This allows your organisation to focus on building long-lasting relationships through customer retention strategies, which are more profitable than strategies which attract new customers.
We’ve identified the three best ways to implement a Cycle of Success in your business.
1. Hire the right people
Be the Preferred Employer
Potential candidates tend to seek companies that have a good image in the community and have an image that is aligned with their values and beliefs.
Select the right people
Ensure that your recruitment team are proactively looking for people that fit your brand. This can be determined through structured interviews, observing candidate behaviour and even conducting personality tests.
2. Enable your people
Inform
Educate employees on organisational culture. Promote core values such as commitment to service excellence, team spirit and mutual respect. Train employees to understand the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ rather than just job specifics.
Teach
Teach your employees visual communication skills such as making eye contact, listening attentively, understanding body language and facial expressions, and reading customers needs. Ensure the requirements of the position and the rules and regulations related to the customer service process are well-communicated and thoroughly understood. These are necessary for optimal job performance and will create better interactions with customers.
Empower
Give employees the ability to make decisions that influence work procedures and organisational direction. This can be through self-managing teams or high involvement tasks of making decisions regarding customisation and service recovery.
Reward
Reward individual or team performance by including bonuses, vacations or honouring them publicly.
3. Motivate and energise your people
Feedback and Recognition
Employees want a sense of identity and belonging to an organisation. This can be developed through feedback from customers, colleagues and managers. Employees who receive praise will want to continue achieving excellence. This can be achieved through feedback meetings and awards such as “employee of the month” to recognise excellent performance.
Goal Achievement
Established goals that are specific, measurable and attainable, yet challenging will be strong motivators to staff members. Employees focus their energy on goals, which results in greater engagement and higher performance.
Integrating these tactics into your business operations will not only result in enhanced employee performance, greater customer retention and higher profitability, but will also be a positive step towards ensuring your business is following a Cycle of Success.
For comprehensive advice on how to incorporate this success strategy into your business operations, contact our team today.