Optimizing Performance, Customer Satisfaction Through Employee Engagement

If you truly want to engage employees as well as you possibly can (and clearly you should want to), the process needs to start during the hiring process.

It is important from that point that the potential employee is aware that we care about his success, and we also want to make sure they understand our core values and unique culture. If done at this stage, then the prospective employee should "get" the job: they know from day one the service, honesty and passion we expect from them, as well as the fun, creative and learning environment they can expect from us.

At this stage, when I talk about performance, I’m really referring to the level of service they provide to our customers, and they need to know from the start that we are not an average company, the service we provide is not average, and we do not expect our employees to be average. We expect the best, and from experience, we now know that getting this first bit right is the most important bit. Don’t spend time managing and changing behaviors. Get them to know what’s expected from the beginning.

The environment you provide for your employees will be mimicked in the level of service they provide to your customers.

• Do not let people be scared of taking risks or making mistakes.
• Let people make gut reactions about what to do.
• Let them improve their own decision making skills
• Give them the freedom to be creative in reaching solutions

If you can create this environment for them, they will be more productive, they will provide a better service, your customers will be more satisfied, they will return more often, and your business will improve.

The tricky part is tracking and monitoring it.

In my organization, this begins with our business intranet, which enables employees to share positive and negative feedback, compliment fellow employees for their successful work and raise concerns in an anonymous, non-punitive arena. Not only do we read and act on that feedback, but behind the scenes we categorize every single comment based on whether it’s an employee compliment, service improvement, general feedback, improvement idea or complaint. What this gives us, is not only great feedback, but a numerical quantity of comments, and to what degree they are spread out over those categories, and measured on a daily basis.

We also send out quarterly surveys or polls to gain more feedback with regards to the environment, culture, improvements and changes, again measuring the engagement of our employees. Now where this gets interesting is that this survey is almost identical in structure to one that on a quarterly basis we send to our customers, and what we found was that when employee engagement went up, so did performance, and so did our customer engagement, and on occasions where employee engagement has fallen, very soon so did performance, and customer engagement did the same.

As most call centers are multi-channel these days, nearly everything I’ve said should be applied to them as well. That said, there are aspects that need emphasis, namely that for each channel used, the expectations need to be understood, and the level of service provided needs to be consistently good. Regardless of the channel a customer uses, what they want most of all is their question, query or issue resolved. Consequently, as long as that level of service is consistent through good, knowledgeable, cared for and engaged employees the customer will be just as happy.

Going beyond salary and "training"

So many times I hear that if you pay the right wage, and provide the right training, then that’s all you need to engage your employees. This is simply not true. Well-paid employees might not leave right away, but they won’t be fully engaged with your organization. They may not admit it outright, but we are all human beings, and for the most part, we want to know how we’re doing and that someone really cares about us.

It is also important to recognize motivation as a separate concept from employee engagement. Money serves to motivate, but if employees are not engaged with the brand that is motivating them, their performance will not be optimized to best serve the customer.

Everyone wants to earn a fair wage, and everyone needs to be able to keep a roof over their heads, pay their bills and get what they’d like, but that doesn’t mean that money is the only reason employees stay or go. We know that a large percentage of our employees stay because of the relationship they have with the company, their manager or team leader, and finally with each other.

In our case, focusing on meaningful employee engagement has enabled us to reduce our cost per contact by about 10%, which I’m sure you can imagine adds to a pretty tidy sum. The simple steps highlighted in this piece were the keys to getting there.