Ensuring that all customers are happy and satisfied is the fundamental step towards growing your customer base, generating new leads, increasing your sales, and boosting your ROI. Customer happiness and satisfaction can be attributed to three things: How helpful your products/services are in solving customers’ life problems, how friendly and supportive your customer service team is, and how well your team handles customer feedback and complaints.
Customers want you to understand their pain points and make improvements accordingly and consistently to your products and services. That tells you that the biggest part of managing customer satisfaction is internal. It has something to do with the employees who serve your customers.
How does your company’s employee engagement affect the overall customer experience? When employees are engaged with their jobs, they can collect feedback from customers, share it within the team, and find its best possible solutions. They can represent your company optimally in the eyes of the customer. Note that the customer relationships your employees create are critical to your overall brand reputation.
With that in mind, employers must keep their employees optimally engaged. How can they do that? Maintaining healthy professional relationships with all workers, charting clear career paths for young and ambitious employees, and fostering pleasant work environments. They need to provide employees with tech tools such as RAR opener for easier sharing of documents via email, communication tools, and remote collaboration tools to foster a culture of knowledge sharing in the workplace. They need to allow flexible working, compensate employees fairly and show genuine care for employee welfare.
Let’s now elaborate further on how employee engagement is the secret to happy customers.
Better customer service
Highly engaged service employees are always happy to help. They don’t just do “the job” for the monthly paycheck. They go over and beyond their job descriptions to ensure that customers leave with a positive perception of the business. They make it their calling to deliver top customer service passionately, whether or not the customer appreciates the extra effort.
They satisfactorily answer questions from customers and even give free advice without the customer asking for it, ensuring that customers learn something new from their interaction. They go down to the personal level and purpose to understand what a customer needs.
Employees value customers in the same way they feel valued by the employer.
Highly engaged employees are generally happy employees. Studies show that human beings can only make others as happy as they are happy themselves. When employees feel like their presence in the company isn’t appreciated, as if their requests are interpreted as a nuisance, they are likely to bring the same negative energy to the customer service desk.
On the other hand, employees who feel valued will always make customers feel valued. If their issues are disregarded and misjudged as “bad attitude,” they might struggle to verbally recognize and appreciate customers who come with “an attitude.” On the other hand, verbal validation and appreciation of the personal struggles that employees deal with help them validate and tolerate customers no matter how nagging or bossy they could be.
Employees genuinely take pride in whatever they sell.
Employees need to be true believers in the brand and the products they sell. They should be proud of the job they do in the community. They should be confident that the job they do has a positive impact on the industry and the world. They should be enthusiastic and passionate about the brand’s mission and vision. They should be proud to be the face of your brand. If they are not, they will always struggle to create a positive experience for customers. You are the one to help them build that enthusiasm through employee engagement.
Increased employee retention
Happy and engaged employees will stick around for many years, during which time they will learn the ropes and understand how the industry works. High employee retention means experienced employees who can anticipate problems, understand industry changes, and maintain a positive brand reputation.
They provide better service and build better customer relationships as a result. They solve complex or unique problems from the customers more quickly and confidently than new employees.
Conclusion
It is clear that without effective employee engagement strategies in place, your company will always struggle to keep clients happy. That is why, on top of giving them bonuses and good benefits, you should be there to listen to their struggles and to make their careers as fulfilling as possible.
