Consistently delivering an exceptional customer experience requires creating employee engagement and culture that cultivates positive service actions.
Once upon a time, employees would often stay with companies for their entire working careers. Now, employers are lucky to keep workers longer than a presidential election cycle.
Consistently delivering an exceptional customer service experience is critical to the long term success of your organization. Only through consistently delivering on the key expectations your customers have can you expect to begin to see customers reward you with long term loyalty. Until you achieve that sacred level of customer loyalty, you leave an open invitation for competitors to steal away your customers.
The revolving door of customer service prevents the positive customer experience
But maintaining consistent service levels can be difficult when you’re operating a revolving door on the customer service call center floor. In order to make customer service consistent and effective, you need expert and tenured customer service team members. That can be difficult when employees are frequently chasing jumping between job opportunities.
In a recent article titled, Hiring employees who are more loyal, Josh Tolan, CEO of Spark Hire, a video-powered hiring network that connects job seekers and employers through video resumes and online interviews, discusses the difficulties that many organizations today have in keeping qualified, expert employees. Josh does a great job identifying some of the requirements that every organization must have in place so that great employee engagement can take place.
Getting long term employee engagement
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average employee tenure is now about 4.4 years. For millennials, this stay is even shorter at only about 2.3 years. So it should come as no shock 91% of Millennials expect to stay in a job for less than three years.
It’s difficult enough just getting millennials excited about doing customer service work in the first place, keeping them long term is an even greater challenge. Keeping customer service agents for the long haul is often more a function of cultural fit, than technical job function.
Consistently delivering an exceptional customer experience requires creating employee engagement and culture that cultivates positive service actions.
A study showed 46% of small-business new hires failed within 18 months, and shockingly, 89% of this failure was attributed to poor company culture fit. At DigiCert, we use resumes and applications to confirm qualifications. The in-person or video interview is more of an audition to ensure that the individual will be a cultural fit, rather than more traditional technical qualification review.
How to improve employee engagement
It takes more than employee engagement activities, games, and food at work. An employee engagement strategy needs to be developed to clearly identify who are your employees and what they need to successfully feel like their time at work is more than just another job.
By creating a positive work environment, treating employees impeccably well, and getting them engaged within their team and the mission of the organization, we’ve been able to retain millennials much, much longer than what the statistics say is normal.
It helps that we preach, teach, live, and breathe customer service. We back it up by enabling our team members to act in the customer’s best interest and empower them to take actions they feel is best for each customer situation.
I think that much more can be done today to make workplaces a better place to work and improve the employee experience. From my experience I’ve seen a directly seen a correlation between the employee experience and the customer experience.
So what do you think? What are some ways you hire loyal employees? Can you effectively create the right motivators to keep your best people long term?
