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The evidence is in: employee experience drives business success. So it’s time to make worker happiness your business priority.
The recipe for staff happiness is a complex one. You can offer all the free lunches and perks you like, but if your customer service team isn’t feeling satisfied and fulfilled in their roles, then they’ll need a really great coffee maker in the kitchen.
It turns out that happiness is a good business strategy. Employee experience (EX) is increasingly recognised as a key ingredient of customer experience (CX). That’s because the way your team feels in their job impacts almost every key performance area of customer service.
For example, unhappy reps might be less inclined to go the extra mile for a customer and give them the kind of experience that delivers true brand loyalty. This is especially important when you consider that 71% of customers switched brands at least once in the past year.
Unhappy employees could also risk undermining opportunities for successful brainstorming and collaboration. But even when employees are doing everything they can to foster collaboration, it will simply take more time and energy to solve customer problems if they don’t have the right tools or data.
And that last thing you want is dissatisfied, stressed-out customer service agents presenting poor impressions to customers — right at the time when you need more happy customers.
Employee happiness might seem like something too ephemeral and personal for an employer to address. But if you think of it more as building great EX, then it becomes something you can take positive action on.
Here are a few tactics to optimise your work environment, improve EX and cultivate greater happiness, inspired by the findings of the State of the Connected Customer report — for both employees and customers.
Customer service agents are natural people pleasers, but if they don’t have the means to do it well it leads to frustration. Providing agents with the tools they need to provide customers with the high-quality CX they crave ensures they’re prepared and confident. For instance, an integrated CRM platform gives reps the customer service analytics they need to effectively engage with a customer, as well as to anticipate their needs and concerns.
Given customers increasingly want service across a range of channels, it makes sense to equip your reps with the means to do so. They can then use data to get a better sense of the volumes that come through each of those channels and prioritise cases accordingly.
Sometimes a call centre agent will be stumped by a problem they can’t immediately solve, especially when using new technologies.
Managers play a strong role here by establishing policies and processes that will give agents access to the kind of coaching they need when they need it.
In some cases, a quick debrief after a difficult call could offer an opportunity to demonstrate ways of using the data available to solve a problem quicker next time.
Or, if an agent seems stuck in a rut or slump after a series of challenging customer interactions, a tune-up session can put them in control of using data more effectively to get back in the groove.
You can also build their confidence by offering them different types of work. Variety is the spice of life and many reps thrive on it. Since it’s a powerful way to upskill and improve collaboration across teams, consider programs or policies that get reps involved in a variety of projects or role secondments.
The occasional pat on the back is nice, but it takes more than that to make an agent happy. Feedback should be as specific as possible for it to really resonate.
The effect of positive feedback and recognition becomes even more powerful when it's acknowledged publicly within an organisation. Consider your internal channels where you can make this happen — employee email newsletters, intranet blog posts, Slack, or a note on the staff social media platform.
Customer service reps who are happy and fulfilled in their job don’t appear out of nowhere. They are the ones who feel empowered by their tools and training, are supported to take ownership of their roles and career ambitions, play an active part in the workplace culture, and are appropriately rewarded and recognised.
It can take a bit of monitoring and experimenting to figure out what works for your team and what doesn’t — but it’s worth it to create employees who feel fulfilled and can help you achieve the kind of CX that’s necessary to succeed today.
