In a recent whitepaper we identified 12 steps to help organizations achieve customer engagement excellence. The second step is “Support Employees as They Support Your Customers.” Employees who deliver customer service are not only the face of your organization, they oftentimes tend to be the first interaction a customer has with your business. This makes them one of the most important aspects of the 12 steps.

Employees are the heart of every company and every contact center. Ensuring they are empowered for success is critical to delivering a good customer experience. In the contact center, customer experience excellence requires a keen focus on non-cognitive performance – the friendliness of resources, how they display empathy, how considerate they act and how they express concern for customers. It’s an area where most organizations fail. Corporate Executive Board research has found that customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty.  Improving non-cognitive performance starts with ensuring an adequate hiring process is in place to begin with to identify and employ the right talent. Non-cognitive skills, customer experience training, employee incentive programs and adopting service center processes that explicitly and formally address customer interactions are also helpful.

Active evaluation of non-cognitive performance is also necessary to help develop solutions, policies and environments that promote employee feedback and input. Using voice of the employee surveys throughout the year is a good way to gain insights into employee perceptions of the workplace, customers they serve, individual areas of growth and systems with which they work. These surveys are also valuable tools to measure and improve the employee and customer experience. Voice of the employee surveys provide the insights necessary to establish and ensure effective resource development and training over time that can help improve customer experience, KPIs and employee satisfaction in the contact center.

With optimized solutions, policies and environments, employees are equipped to make decisions in the best interest of the customer. Building an environment where incentives are appropriately aligned and input is encouraged, reviewed and acted upon, promotes an engaged environment for employees and a positive impact on customer experience excellence.

If you would like to learn more about the other steps you should take in order to achieve excellence in customer engagement, click the image below to download a free copy of the whitepaper.

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