For businesses looking to build loyalty among their customers, success ultimately doesn’t hinge on marketing or advertising campaigns or on automation , AI bots and Customer Experience (CX) platforms, but on the quality of engagement provided by their customer service agents, who are often the true face of the company.
Local businesses are investing heavily in improving customer experience, often focusing on gleaning insights from data related to customer behaviour and then deploying tools to enhance customer interactions.
In markets such as South Africa, however, experience has shown that people want to speak to a human when they have an issue that needs resolving, rather than chatting with a bot.
The technology might be there, but we are either seeing the limitations of these automated systems being exposed, or the people are yet to fully take to it. And this puts the focus back on customer service agents and their ability to help resolve issues.
Investment in employee experience remains a blind spot
Business leaders must keep in mind that customer service agents frequently deal with irate customers on a daily basis, enduring complaints about the brand and even rude language. Despite this, they are expected to maintain a positive attitude and deliver exceptional service.
Getting this right requires a concerted investment in enhancing the employee experience (EX), and this can include the following:
- Empowerment and support: Businesses must ensure employees feel the company supports them with the necessary tools, systems, and information. Furthermore, employees must be empowered to make decisions that help the customer.
- Cultural strategy: Cultural change cannot be solely a top-down initiative - you cannot instruct your employees to be engaged. The process must be driven bottom-up and include engaging employees to understand their needs.
- Consistency: Programmes designed to boost employee morale or drive culture must be consistent. Culture is ultimately driven by people and results from various plans, but it is not a plan in itself.
- Employee recognition: Apart from awards, a practical way of driving EX is through holding competitions that ask employees to suggest ways to improve CX and offering a prize for the idea with the biggest organisational impact.
Tangible benefits of improving employee experience
Employees feel supported when they feel that their role - no matter how big or small - is important and adds value to the organisation.
This has a direct correlation with the effort that they put into problem-solving, and these agents are more likely to go above and beyond the usual in order to resolve an issue for a customer.
Engaged employees also show greater loyalty and are more likely to stay with the company, reducing staff turnover and training costs. On the other hand, high churn among agents often results in inconsistent service, with the business seeing some customers rating their experience as the “best”, while others rate it as the “worst”.
Empowered service agents also have a role to play when it comes to innovation; they are at the forefront of interaction with customers and might come up with ideas that seem simple but end up positively enhancing the customer's experience, for which they can gain recognition.
Measuring success
Businesses traditionally measure EX initiatives by using Employee Net Promoter Score, which gauges employee sentiment.
However, they need to move beyond simply asking how likely an employee is to recommend the brand, and include various aspects to better understand the business’s position and identify service gaps.
Crucially, businesses should benchmark employee experience against customer experience in order to analyse the impact of improvements in one on the other.
If improving employee experience shows no corresponding change in customer experience, it may indicate the business is incorrectly focusing on non-critical elements of customer service.
Ultimately, businesses have to face the reality that happy employees are the foundation of happy customers and that investing in employee engagement and satisfaction is not merely a function or programme of the HR department but needs to be a core component of business operations in order to drive customer success and sustained growth.
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