As a business owner you’ve been told that you must provide exemplary customer service to grow your business. What you may not realize is that providing great customer service can help your business internally as well. Read on to find out how a customer-centric business model is also great for your employees.
More Than Technology
Using your technology effectively is the foundation of customer service. Make it easy to speak to a representative, navigate your website, check out and return items. To have great customer service takes training and creating a business culture around the customer. Once you’ve focused on having a website and representatives that can meet the language demands of your customers, once you’ve trained your representatives to listen actively and think outside the box to meet customer needs, you’ve empowered your employees to make decisions for the company.
Empowered Employees
Empowered employees feel trusted, so it is no surprise that the first benefit of empowered employees is increased job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is inversely proportional to employee turnover. Training a new employee costs about $1,000. Every time your business is able to hold onto an employee you have saved yourself a grand. There’s more benefit than reduced turnover. When you build a culture of trust, where you do right by the customer, you’re also building the type of culture that attracts the best job applicants. Now you’ve got better employees who are staying longer, allowing them to do what’s best, which means when they see an opportunity to improve processes, they are going to take it. Improved processes then lead to solving problems even more quickly, and again, your customers are receiving even better customer service.
You can see how the cycle of customer-first service feeds into a model of employee satisfaction which feeds back into better customer service. It’s a positive cycle that you want to get in on from the first customer interaction your business has.
