- To Make Customers Happy Don't Skimp On Customer Service Satisfaction
- To Make Customers Happy Don't Skimp On Customer Service Video
Let’s start with some bad news!
- 70% of American workers do not commit to their work fully. (Gallup)
- Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies around $450 to $550 billion a year. (HR Dive)
- 100 unhappy employees cost $390 000 per year due to lost productivity. (Kansas State University)
- Negative employees scare off your customers. (Gallup)
Businesses started realizing that to achieve success, setting up a customer-first policy is a must.
Even though prioritizing your customers’ needs will most certainly increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, under no circumstances should managers forget about equally important assets of their company – employees!
If you don’t know how to do it right, you can take a look at our guide to measuring customer satisfaction to make things easier. Customer satisfaction is a factor that helps you stand out of the competition. Kate Zabriskie once said that: “Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.” and we. Many customer service advisers make the mistake of not listening and just wait for the chance to reply. But showing that you’re actively listening can make a world of difference. You can do this by repeating what your customer is saying, asking questions as they’re talking or summarising the issue at the end of your talk. The quality of your customer service can make or break your business. According to American Express, one-third of Americans would consider switching providers after just one bad customer service experience. One bad customer service conversation can be fatal to your business. It shouldn’t be a surprise.
Yes, measuring happiness might be a bit challenging but it is worth the effort as you don’t want to have dissatisfied employees sloppily doing tasks they don’t enjoy.
Negativity is an airborne infection. The lack of happiness of one of your employees will cause dissatisfaction in another. This cycle will then reach your customers, and your staff’s low supply of energy and motivation will take root in them.
If the above-provided statistics were not enough to convince you to start caring about your employee happiness, in the following sections we will provide more details and benefits of happier employees.
In other words, we’ve listed bad news, and now it’s time for some good news!
Benefits of Happier Employees
1. More Creativity
Employee-customer interaction is not scripted roleplay. In a world of rapidly changing customer preferences and increasing competition between the organizations, creativity becomes important when determining success.
Innovative thinking is a critical skill for your employees as your customer service staff is the first representative of your business that customers interact with. Happiness contributes to the creativity because it increases the mental flexibility of people and promotes the positive reception of new challenges, as stated in the article by Alice Isen.
These qualities are exactly what you want your employees to possess if you want to increase the positive attitude of customers towards your business.
2. Better Service
Employee that is satisfied and happy with the company is more motivated with provided products/services, which helps serve customers with more information and enthusiasm.
According to Gallup, companies that have happier employees show 147% higher earnings per share than their competitors.
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This makes sense. If a happier employee is more informed about the product and presents it to the customer with enthusiasm and positive energy, certainly the latter will find the informing service preferable and will be willing to visit the business again.
3. Saved Money
Employee that enjoys the workplace is more likely to stay. Think about the additional costs you will have to face when hiring a new worker such as the cost of advertising or interviewing, the cost of onboarding and training, the cost of errors as well as time for adjusting and etc. It is too much of a headache and most of the times not worth the hassle.
4. Better Customer Relationship
A warm smile, a positive attitude, attentiveness and motivation. These are all the qualities of an engaged customer service representative and also the qualities necessary for making a customer happy.
Human emotions, regardless positive or negative, are easily transmittable. Make sure that the only emotion that your employees are communicating with your customers is positivity. Invest in the happiness of your workers and see yourself how it will pay back with happy customers willing to shop with you more.
How to Promote Employee Happiness
Chrome remote desktop rechner herunterladen. Now you understand the significance of satisfied staff but might still be wondering how do you make your employees happy?
Well, there are several things that you can do and the best thing about it is that it comes from the employees themselves!
1. Innovate With Technology
92% of employees indicated that technology would increase their work satisfaction. New technology makes the work easier for your employees and transforms repetitive tasks into a more enjoyable experience. With an increasing number of millennials in the workforce, innovative gadgets should be a must at your workplace.
Such innovations will promote clearer communication between the workers and fewer errors. It might sound counter-intuitive but the implementation of technology might promote more human interaction.
Tools that automate the sing-in process of your customers, for example, will give your workers more time to interact with customers and build a genuine relationship with them.
2. Productive Workplace
The physical state of the office or a shop is an important aspect of promoting productivity. Make sure that the working space is organized exactly the way that would promote positive energy while providing the necessary things for your employee’s needs.
One of the best ways to do so is letting them personalize the workplace. Who would know how your employees want their working place to look like if not your employees themselves? Give them the freedom to organize things as they wish to and have a place that they can call their own.
3. Valuing Their Effort
Nothing kills the motivation more than someone not appreciating your hard work and dedication.
But also, on the contrary, praising your employees will motivate them for better future performance. Companies, where managers focused on the strength of their employees, showed more than double worker engagement compared to the company where the weaknesses of the employees were highlighted.
Don’t be quick to criticize your employees for committed mistakes. Rather, provide a feedback that will benefit the person for future performance and encourage by additional training or motivation.
4. Ask for Feedback
Just because your employees have a smile on their face today does not mean that it will be there forever.
Don’t think that your employees are satisfied or that it will stay fixed like that forever. Keep monitoring your employees’ attitude towards work and their level of satisfaction.
Set monthly or quarterly meetings with your workers do discuss their satisfaction and feelings regarding the work. Going the extra mile will prove itself being beneficial!
You should need no more convincing how important employee satisfaction is for you, for the customer and for employees themselves!
It is a concept that is beneficial for all parties involved. A concept that will reward greatly if you address it appropriately, however, will punish severely if you will ignore it.
The online travel industry doesn’t exactly have a reputation for great customer service. A cursory glance at Twitter will tell you that. A lot of companies look at customer support as a cost center – a necessary part of the business, but something that should be done as efficiently and cheaply as possible, or something that’s only worth an effort when a critical mass of customers has been reached. I think it’s the reverse. A great reputation can actually help you grow your customer base – each customer service inquiry is a touch point with a potential customer or a potential promoter (aka word-of-mouth marketer).
From the beginning I knew that great support would be a differentiator for HotelTonight, and that it needed to be available at all hours (last-minute hotel bookers need resolution in the moment). So in the early days, even before we built out our support team, COO Jared Simon, CTO Chris Bailey and I were receiving CS calls on our mobile phones 24/7. There were definitely times we had to step out of a restaurant (or get out of bed) to help out a customer. While it was a sacrifice, it set the bar high for the importance of quality customer service in the HT organization.
Our world-class Customer Support has since grown to a full-fledged, ‘round-the-clock, multi-lingual team, and I believe it’s one of the major factors that sets us apart from other travel companies. Here’s what we do differently – and why you should, too.
Knock ‘Em Out With Service
If someone’s taking the time to contact a company’s customer support, it’s probably for good reason. And more times than not, I’d bet you they aren’t fully expecting to get a warm response or the resolution they want. Everyone’s had a bad experience with customer service (if you haven’t, I’d suggest you start playing the lottery now) and many go into the situation a bit jaded.
Set yourself apart by surprising them, with both empathy and a prompt resolution. Be personable (our CS team is trained on our brand voice, and pepper their interactions with situation-appropriate humor). Be personal (invest the time and money to allow for tailored, not canned, responses). Take responsibility when something goes wrong. Be willing to fix it. Hear the customer out, even if their issue is something out of your control. Have a team motto. Ours is: get ‘em in a room, knock ‘em out with service, let ‘em sleep happy.
Your customers should leave the interaction feeling positive about your company, no matter the outcome. The customer might not always be right – but they do have a right to be heard.
Set Aggressive, Measurable Goals
In our weekly all-hands meetings, each team shares their goals and progress, and our CS team has objectives as aggressive as the rest. I’m exceptionally proud that as a result of such goals, our support ratings are consistently sky high, our email response time is incredibly fast (so fast that at first we had trouble finding tools and services that could keep up) and we’ve drastically reduced our call abandonment (customers hanging up before someone answers). Our phone calls are answered nearly immediately, because we’ve made sure to always have a team on standby for every single call coming through – in 5 languages.
Integrate Customer Feedback into the Product
Tracking customer comments, questions and suggestions helped us predict potential issues, and make changes to the product to head them off before they ever happened. Among our many customer-driven product updates: prioritizing the launch of certain cities, adding a traceable h-bed (our logo) to the booking confirmation screen to prevent accidental bookings and designing a badge key explaining what our hotel categories mean. All have been enormously beneficial to the product’s success – and to our customer’s happiness.
Build Your Team Differently
Turnover is high in the customer service industry. So we went about hiring differently, with the goal of recruiting happy and long-term employees. Here’s what we did: we went straight to the work-from-home model, which allows team members flexibility and a calm workspace (rather than often-hectic call centers). It also afforded opportunities that might not have been otherwise available in our team members’ hometowns, and since we didn’t need to find people who were all in one place, we could afford to be picky and find the best of the best, no matter their location.
Since our team is remote, we’ve worked hard to make sure they feel connected to the rest of the HT team, and to each other. We use HipChat company-wide, and the CS team is constantly logged into it, sharing not only CS issues and strategies for handling them but also their personalities. When a new Support Ace starts, they’re paired up with a mentor from the CS Lead team, who trains them and checks in with a weekly 1-on-1 phone call to review metrics, see how the week went and hear the Ace’s feedback and suggestions. We take the time to figure out what the team is excited about – each of our CS Senior Leads, for example, has taken on a speciality based on their interests. And monthly peer- and Lead-nominated awards reward those who’ve gone above and beyond, taking on the toughest requests and bringing an endlessly positive attitude to the team environment.
As a result of these hiring and team building strategies we’ve had a very low attrition rate, and grown a team of passionate, efficient people who care about the company and product.
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Great support keeps our bookers happy, our social media interactions positive and our partners pleased. It’s even gotten us good press. Hearing rave reviews from a hotel partner that a member of our team helped her less-than-tech-savvy mother book a room on the app, or getting an email that another Support Ace helped a family caught in a blizzard find the last room available nearby is enormously gratifying, and validates all the time and effort we put into our support strategy. Happy customers often become return customers, and advocates of your product and brand. That’s marketing you can’t pay for.
To Make Customers Happy Don't Skimp On Customer Service Satisfaction
Who’s doing it right: what’s the best customer support experience you’ve ever had?
To Make Customers Happy Don't Skimp On Customer Service Video
Photo: HotelTonight