Employee Motivation & Customer Experience
Impact of employee motivation on customer experience An often misunderstood factor in customer experience is employee motivation.
The enthusiasm of highly motivated employees reflects onto customers in a contagious way. Enthusiastic employees make enthusiastic customers.
Employee motivation starts at day 1.
As important as first impressions are for customer experience, as important they are during the very first contact with employees, the job interview. Managers in the process of hiring new people understand very well the importance of the first impression the interviewee makes, very often however they forget that first impressions work both ways. Job interviews that are a great experience for both parties are the basis for employee motivation and lead to long lasting working relationships.
After a good start, employee motivation is a high priority continuing process, which should be an important part of the company culture. Following strategies help creating a culture of highly motivated employees who constantly care about the Customer Experience:
* Customer Centric Thinking
Make sure employees are aware of the importance of Customer Experience for the success of the company. Learn them to adopt customer centric thinking, let them see through the eyes of the customer. Let your employees "walk a mile in your customer's shoes". Create continuing education programs for your employees to further develop their customer handling skills.
* Empower your employees to take decisions
Move some of the decision making w.r.t. Customer Experience to the front line. New ideas which are not implemented top-down but come from the front line are much more likely to be successful. Changes are adopted much easier when employees are fully behind them and believe in them, when it's their own idea this is out of the question. The role for management in this process is to facilitate the decision making and to evaluate and prioritize the front line suggestions.
* Help implementing employee suggestions
When a decision to implement a change has been taken, management should provide full support in order to implement it asap. Provide resources, make the necessary procedural changes,etc. When employees are empowered to take decisions, it is important that management moves away all obstacles that could prevent the implementation of new ideas.
* Provide feedback
Continuous open feedback is an important factor in employee motivation, especially when employees are empowered for decision making. Both internal (colleagues) and external (customers) feedback are equally important. Make sure both types of feedback are gathered and transmitted to the employees in a direct and open manner. This will make employees aware of the impact of their actions and allows them to continually adjust and optimize their day to day work.
* Incentives
There is a lot of argument on whether incentives are the right way to motivate employees or not. Either way, it is a fact of life that incentives can help directing employees. To increase the impact of incentives, employees can be involved in the determination of the incentive types.
* Provide resources
Support your employees in achieving a great Customer Experience by making the right resources readily available. Whether it's funding, technology or any other resource required in the execution of their day to day work.
* Embrace employee's concerns
Allow your employees to express their concerns in an open way. Act on their concerns and give regular feedback on the progress.
* Adopt the Highest Standards and live by them
Implementing programs like Operational Excellence allow you to deliver the highest quality products & services and assure customer loyalty. Lowering standards will increase customer turnover and ultimately damage your company's image.
All strategies listed above allow you to keep employees motivated and enthusiastic, while constant customer focus is part of the company culture.
Bottom line: Employee Motivation and Customer Experience go hand in hand, in fact they constantly fuel each other.
By Bart De Craene
By day I work as Global Services Manager at Waters, I also run a blog on the effect of first impressions on Customer Experience - http://120ms.blogspot.com
The views expressed in the article by the author do not necessarily reflect the views of Engineers International. We do not endorse or recommend anything implied from the article(s).
Source: www.articlebiz.com
