How To Cultivate Employee Satisfaction for Optimal Business Success

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You need happy and satisfied employees to have a successful, long-lasting company. How your employees feel about work can affect how they operate, and if they aren’t satisfied or don’t have the proper tools, it can affect your customers. Ultimately, if your employees are fulfilled in their roles, your customers benefit from the productivity and higher standards your staff brings to their work. Let’s talk about how to make this happen.

Make Sure Employees Are Satisfied

You shouldn’t assume your employees are happy and satisfied with their work. You must ask them how they feel. You can get feedback from your employees anonymously through surveys. Or bring them in for one-on-one meetings. If you do, ask them how they like their job and the changes they’d like to see to be happier at work so they can pass those feelings on to the customer base.

A happy employee will be more engaged, they’ll show empathy, and they’ll want to go above and beyond to assist because they know it’s for the betterment of the company. You want employees who are happy when they show up for work each day. So ask them what you can do to get them there.

In addition to being happy, your staff also needs to be motivated. If you get the sense that they’re not there yet, then the office environment may be to blame. Are the leaders in your organization going above and beyond to show the employees that they’re appreciated, and are you providing some sort of initiative for them to give 110%? Consider providing recognition and rewards for a job well done, including physical rewards like gift cards and meaningful perks, such as the chance to move up within the company when they meet certain thresholds.

Some employees may want more challenges to help work feel less monotonous. These employees are great for your company. Give them the chance to take part in research and development (R&D), or provide them with tasks outside of their wheelhouse. Make sure these new tasks can contribute to customer satisfaction as well, such as creating a new help desk user interface. Furthermore, you could even consider funding professional development courses for employees who want to learn new skills. 

Give Your Employees The Tools They Need

The next step is to provide your staff with the proper tools to ensure customer satisfaction so you get positive reviews. In addition to giving them a good computer with a reliable connection, you also want to provide the tools to help them get through any interaction. Implement a ticket or help desk system to escalate service needs that may be new to them.

Also, provide a knowledge base of helpful information, including documents, how-tos, and other guidance they can access with a few mouse clicks. While text can be helpful, try to also mix in some videos and screenshots because they can give the employees a better picture of what they need to know. Finally, provide the staff with a way to report bugs in the system when they come across them. Often, your customers need to use these same systems, so ensuring that they work properly can keep everyone satisfied.

It’s also vital to continue to develop your employees over time because there are many perks to doing so. When they know that their hard work will pay off and that they could be promoted in the future, they’re likely to show more effort. Not only that, but they’ll likely stay at your company for longer and refer other top-notch employees who will further satisfy your customer's needs.

Just ensure you follow through on the development aspect instead of providing empty promises in the hope that you’ll see a bump in their production. Sit down with each employee, outline the steps they’ll need to take to be promoted, and provide guidance on achieving those goals. If they do the work, then follow through on your word. Your employees will appreciate that you appreciate them, and they’ll go above and beyond to meet the customer's needs.

Determine If Your Customers Are Satisfied

There are multiple stages in the customer’s journey. Most, if not all customers buy a product or service because it solves a problem they have. If your employees are doing good work because they’re happy in their roles, your product/service should work well from the get-go. This is the first stage at which customers can be satisfied.

Thereafter, customer satisfaction is directly influenced by customer service in the event that something goes wrong with your product/service. Their satisfaction may also be influenced by how your brand portrays itself online and elsewhere.

Throughout these stages of the customer’s journey, seek feedback to determine if your employee satisfaction efforts are lending themselves to business success.

You can gauge customer satisfaction in many ways, starting with capturing feedback immediately after a sales or service transaction. Once the customer has been assisted, the employee can offer them a chance to fill out a survey and answer honestly about how satisfied they are with what transpired. It’s wise to get their opinions immediately after the interaction so the details are fresh in their minds.

Examine client data and look at metrics such as satisfaction score and social sentiment analysis to determine their satisfaction level. You can also determine the satisfaction of your customers by looking at your return on investment. Are they returning to you after their first visit and spending money? If they’re not, then you may need to make some changes. 

Social media presence is also important because it’s a great tool for marketing your products and services. However, you must meet your customers where they are. Before you do a full-scale marketing push, research and survey your customers to see the platforms they frequent most so you know you'll reach them. Once you figure that out, engage with them regularly.

You can learn much about your customers and your employees based on how they act on social media. Most people will have no problem voicing their frustrations when they receive a broken product or get lousy service, and you can help them when you see their comments. You can also pay attention to how your staff acts on social media. Do they also complain about their job? Are they curt when the customers complain? If you’re seeing friction, then you have work to do. 

The point is that you can’t properly service your customers if you don’t have content employees, so you need to work on doing what’s best for both parties. Properly motivate your staff and then survey your customers to see if they’re satisfied, and continue to make tweaks until you get it just right.nsure your teams, business, and consumers genuinely thrive as the landscape continues to evolve.

About the Author: Luke Smith is a writer and researcher turned blogger. Since finishing college he is trying his hand at being a freelance writer. He enjoys writing on a variety of topics but technology and business topics are his favorite. When he isn't writing you can find him traveling, hiking, or gaming.

Keep Calm and Carry On: How to Engage With Your Customers

We are living in troubling times fraught with uncertainty. There is no coronavirus playbook. Company leaders are facing an unprecedented crisis as the COVID-19 outbreak spreads worldwide and impacts businesses across multiple industries. There are many questions about what comes next in the COVID-19 outbreak.

Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for World War II. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities.

 During this time of uncertainty this saying can provide some advice about dealing with what we can control. Focus solely on the here and now and the things you can control. Here are ten things you can to remain focused on customers during this challenging period.

1.      Communicate, communicate, communicate. In times of trouble, it is best to start a dialog with your customers. Moreover, it is better to over-communicate rather than under-communicate. Much of the problem in the current crisis is uncertainty. Communicating with your customers will not reduce the global uncertainty around the health crisis. Still, it will provide some small sense of certainty around how your organization will react to it. People value predictability in times of uncertainty. So, do your small part; Over-communicate and overshare.

2.      Be transparent. Be open and honest with your customers. People will understand things that are not great news when you do. I’ve had two interesting emails from Southwest Airlines and Delta explaining what they were doing to respond to the crisis. They were open and honest, and perhaps more importantly, they weren’t trying to hide or spin things. They acknowledged the issue, explained how they were changing their cleaning process to respond.

3.      Mind the tone of your communication. It is best to have a sincere tone that is authentic, empathetic, and, perhaps most importantly, confident. People want leadership. People want to believe you, and they will only accept you if you’re sincere and feel you’re authentic and empathetic to their situation.

4.      Be fair.  This time is not the time to price gouge. (I’m looking at you online hand sanitizer vendors.)

5.      Listen and be empathetic. I recommend putting yourself in your customers’ shoes (because we are, aren’t we?). Recognize that customers are going to be emotional and anxious. Empathy means that you understand where they’re coming from, but it doesn’t mean you have to give them everything they demand. Listen to your customers.

6.      Invest in the long-term with customers. People will remember the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020, and they will tell their stories. You want them to tell good stories about your company, not cautionary tales. Nobel-Prize winning Economist Professor Daniel Kahneman talks about this with the Peak-End Rule, which says that what people remember about experiences is the strongest emotion they felt (the Peak) and how they felt at the end. Moreover, people still talk about the fact that Southwest Airlines were the only airline after 9/11 that let people change flights without any additional costs. People have long memories when it comes to these things. The long and short of it is to think long term.

7.      Set proper expectations. You should give them the bad news. However, it is essential to tell them WHY you have bad news. While it may upset them at that particular moment, people will understand. (Moreover, if you go back to number two, which is about being transparent, honest and open, and number three, you’re sincere, authentic, empathetic and confident in your approach, then you know you have to tell them the bad news.) People understand the difference between bad things happening to them and how they are treated when bad things happen to them. Also, people with financial difficulties know it is terrible to have them; however, they also remember how people treated them when they had financial problems. This COVID-19 situation is not pleasant for anybody, but people will remember how they are treated by your organization when going through this “not nice” situation. People will make allowances because of that. We’re all in it together.

8.      Think of the next step. Customers feel more confident when they know you are thinking ahead. What we know is this is bad. It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. However, what happens after this? If you have those answers, it will help build a relationship with your customers.

9.      Recognize how people feel coming into the experience. People will be stressed and anxious, and it will be best to do things to mitigate their feelings and manage them to a better place. In other words, when people call into the call center who are feeling stressed and anxious, getting them off the phone as fast as you can might not be the best thing to do. However, you might have to because people are sick in the call center, and you might be understaffed. Well, guess what? You have to be open and honest with people and tell the callers if you can’t spend a lot of time talking to them. The point is, you should recognize that stress and anxiety will be on the other end of the line and react accordingly.

10.   Suggest new ways of interacting. Every cloud has a silver lining, even at times of change like this one. The silver lining here is you could potentially get people to change their habits. If you want them to move online, then maybe now is an opportunity to do that, with some support from you. Now is also a time to help meet customers’ needs by getting them to do something different. If it can coincide with what you want them to do in six months when this is over, then all the better.

 While it’s impossible to predict where we will be in the coming days or months, there are always ways to be ready for change and keep both customers and employees informed. Remember to be adaptable and emphatic. Customers and employees are looking to the government and businesses for guidance right now. Find ways of supporting your community and ask for their support in return.

We’re all in this together. That is key to this COVID-19 situation. You’re in this along with the customers, and we’re all doing our part to fight the virus. The main thing is to keep calm and carry on and just keep safe.