Getting your employees to love your customers, who real empathy, and offer pristine customer service is one of the best ways for businesses to boost their revenues and build a better brand for themselves. Nonetheless, many managers struggle when it comes to instilling their employees with the values and skills needed to treat their customers right. So where should companies begin?
By studying the techniques of companies with fantastic consumer-employee relationships, and by avoiding some common mistakes, you can set your business down the path to success in no time.
Employee training makes empathetic workers
The first step in training your workforce with the skills they’ll need to be happy and polite around customers is evaluating your employee training process. You should ask yourself if your training program covers how to interact with customers during normal day to day operations as well as during crises, for instance, rather than focusing entirely on the business-end of their jobs. Retail workers especially need to be specially trained to deal with customers who are easily stressed or combative.
Once you’ve established whether your training program instills employees with empathetic, people-centered skills, you’ll be on the right track towards incentivizing your workers to provide service with an earnest smile. Part of making sure your employee workforce is genuinely loving your customers is being cautious not to push them too far; overly worked employees won’t be able to deal with stressed out customers screaming in their faces.
One of the most common ways that businesses force their employees to step on the toes of customers is frequent calls that anger everyone involved. You should never waste your customer’s time – doing so won’t only anger them, but will frustrate your employees, who feel as if they’re time and efforts are being wasted. Successful, positive interactions should be praised by managers to establish them as the desired norm.
Of course, not everything is about the carrot – sometimes, a stick has to be involved. Stringent measures should be in place for employees who mouth off to customers or give the company a bad name. Everyone makes mistakes, but managers should be on the lookout for workers who just lack people skills, and issue stern warnings when things go wrong. If there’s not a quick turnaround in their behavior, it might be time to find a new addition to your team.
Learn to appreciate your customers
Far too often, both average employees and business owners take their loyal customers for granted. Your brand’s consumers or business’ loyal clients don’t owe you anything; forget to treat them like royalty, and they’ll soon be forgetting your company when it comes time to go shopping.
A powerful way to incentivize your employees to remember how well they should treat customers is to reward their good behavior. Employees who frequently get high approval ratings in customer feedback, for instance, should be fast-tracked for raises or promotions. Rewarding those workers who go the extra mile doesn’t just ensure they’ll love customers in the future, but also sets a good example for others who may initially lack the people skills needed to succeed in their jobs.
Building a culture of employee engagement isn’t easy; your company will need to invest seriously in its training program, and in ways that you may not have initially considered. Not everything about your training programs should focus on computer skills, or the business operations your workers will be involved with; everyone, from CEOs to entry level workers, need to learn the value of people skills.
Rewarding consistently good behavior, putting employees who have frequent disputes customers on a short leash, and revamping your training program are just the start of making your company a more customer-friendly business. To have real impact, change will need to come from the top – why should your employees care about how they treat customers if they see managers or CEOs misbehaving, for instance?
Getting rid of employee’s indifference to customer’s wellbeing will take time, and it may involve bringing in new people, like those who helped achieve the top 10 insurance for motorbike. Keep your chin up, however – those companies with the best customer-business relationships are those which are the most likely to climb to the top of the marketplace.
