In our latest article, Do ‘excellent companies to work for’ provide better quality customer service?, we introduced the concept of a holistic approach to customer service. The article demonstrated that there is a link between staff satisfaction with their roles in the companies they work for and quality of customer service, based on results from the getclosure Customer Centricity Ratings and the latest Job Crystal Happiness Indicator.
To have top quality customer service and retain your customers, you need to ensure that your staff are happy and motivated. Here are a couple of suggestions of how to do this:
Engage with your employees
Build a corporate culture that requires employees to be an integral part of the company – talk to your employees about the overall mission and values of the company and about how their efforts contribute to achieving it. Work out what method of communication works best, and use it to give your employees regular feedback, suggestions and tips. Remember to ask them for their suggestions and feedback too.
Empower your staff to make decisions
“Job dissatisfaction usually boils down to not feeling recognised, or not seeing how you are making a difference,” said Kevin Laithwaite, managing director of JobCrystal, the only interactive talent management portal in South Africa. “Combine this with the trend, started in the IT world, that you work on a project, rather than for a company, for a set period of time and then move on.
“Typically employees expect these project groups to be fairly autonomous, with significant decision making powers. So as an employer, if you want keep your staff happy and hang on to your top talent you need to supply them with the tools and information they need to do their jobs, and then let them get on with it.”
Offer a work schedule with as much flexibility as possible
Staff satisfaction and productivity are almost guaranteed to improve if you give your employees the opportunity to avoid the worst of the traffic, squeeze in a doctors appointment or watch their son’s first rugby match. This doesn’t mean they should work fewer hours, just that they should be able to start or finish early, or work some of the day from home. With smart phones and increasingly affordable broadband, this is more and more possible in a number of industries – you just need to make the mind shift and embrace this way of working.
Article by: Emma Donovan, Content Manager of www.getclosure.co.za. getclosure is South Africa’s leading independent complaints management and consumer affairs portal. The getclosure service is fast, free and effective for consumers. All suppliers have the opportunity to respond to complaints on the getclosure site, free of charge. getclosure also makes a host of consumer rights news and information available to South Africans.
