Consistent Customer Service is the Result of Supporting Your Employees

The highest level of customer experience goes hand in hand with customer retention. Admittedly this might sound like a no-brainer. Yet—despite it costing 5-10x more to gain new customers than to get more business from current ones, and that current customers spend a whopping 67% more, on average—companies often focus more on customer acquisition than on pleasing their already loyal customer base. So where to begin? Creating consistently world-class CX across locations starts with supporting your employees.

How Is Your Internal Culture?

More to the point, are you experiencing employee roulette that has you scrambling to keep up with turnover? Whether or not that is the case, it’s always a good time for an epiphany.

Numerous factors are involved in creating the best experience for your employees and becoming the type of business that great employees find:

• As leaders, we choose the people our employees spend the most time with. Happy employees tend to stay where they feel most engaged, supported, and valued. Unhappy employees, on the other hand, don’t just quit leaders, they quit co-workers. And top talent won’t endlessly tolerate feeling drained by the people around them. They will look elsewhere unless their leaders ensure they have co-workers who are similarly enthusiastic and committed to the company’s mission.
• Employees are also stakeholders, and their feedback is valuable. In modern Stakeholder Theory, for a company to experience health and success long-term, employees must be considered and satisfied. And while everyone wants to be paid a competitive wage and have benefits most also want to feel they are part of something bigger. Employees want to feel inspired. Consider conducting Stay Interviews with your current employees to learn why they stick around. Inviting feedback on a regular basis will strengthen employee engagement, and ultimately their ability to provide excellent customer service.
• Great leaders get to know their teams. Employers typically know a little about their teams’ families, and sometimes what they do for fun outside the workplace. But for the highest level of trust, employees need their leaders to also understand their aspirations and dreams, in the company and beyond. The best business performance is always built on this foundation. By using the FORD method leaders can improve relationships and establish greater trust between management and teams both within and across locations.
• Great leaders care about their employees on all levels. Team members need to know that their mental wellness matters to their leaders. They function at a higher level in general when confident that management cares about them and their families. To combat the rising levels of workplace burnout, companies have begun offering mental health resources (both proactive and reactive) and mental health days as well as providing workplace-specific mental health training for leaders. As for leaders who are vulnerable with their team members, sharing their own struggles? They tend to engender the strongest loyalty from employees who feel more at ease sharing their own mental health issues, with less fear of being stigmatized.
• Great leaders help their employees reach their full potential. Employees should be made aware of professional development opportunities throughout their employment, starting on day one of their customer experience training. Continually offering in-house examples of employees who are rewarded for their efforts encourages both new hires and current team members to chart and own their career paths.

These are some proven ways to not only support your employees but create consistent customer service across all your locations.

John R. DiJulius is a best-selling author, consultant, keynote speaker, and president of The DiJulius Group, the leading customer experience consulting firm in the nation. He blogs on Customer experience trends and best practices.