Employees are closest to your customers. It is their interaction with the client that builds your reputation. Your employees' commitment to the company and specifically to the job is reflected in the way they work. Their skill and passion also contributes to the success of customers.
Unfortunately, employeee experience in the company is put on the back burner by many business leaders. It is because most times companies evaluate their relationships with employees in the most idealistic conditions, where they are compensated for their time. But there are several human factors involved, such as a lack of motivation, fatigue, and slow growth, that create dissatisfaction among employees.
The problem is that company does not have to bear the consequences of poor employee experience. It is the clients. First off, their experience with the company is ruined, which results in high churn rate, lower productivity, and bottom-line setbacks.
The acceptance of human factors in any task is important. For example, physical and mental exhaustion, inefficient processes, and discord with superiors affect employees' commitment to the company. Once companies accept the role of human factors, they could plan on the measures to evade its impact and work on improving the employee experience in the company.
The kind of tasks the team handles is also critical to the customer experience. For instance, if you manage a field service team, they might face a set of challenges totally different from the back-office team. Teams at the front line need more support and tools to make informed and effective decisions and deliver outstanding customer experience to clients.
It is quite obvious that when employees are not motivated, they cannot work with full commitment. Their bad experience in the company could impact their efficiency and dedication.
Delay in service response.
Can you imagine disengaged employees working to their full potential? Research shows that well-engaged, happy employees are 31 percent more productive and three times more creative than their disengaged counterparts. But when employees are unhappy, their attention gets divided. In the long-run, it impacts their productivity, efficiency, and creativity.
As productivity declines, the delay in service response is natural. If the usual resolution time is three days, it could take a week or more, resulting in bad customer experiences.
Employees could be unhappy or feel dissatisfied for many reasons, from unfair treatment to frustrations with poorly designed processes or bad compensation. Most times, you will not know what is going around in the company until the results are visible, such as employees leaving or a rising number of customer complaints.
Errors in job performed
Even small interruptions in the job increase the error rate in employees. We all get interrupted every 11 minutes. Now imagine the plight of an employee who is already having poor experience in the company. Things get even worse when processes are manual.
Another upsetting part of the poor employee experience is that clients are on the receiving end. They are the first people to bear the consequences of a poor job done by the employee.
Most times, unhappy employees choose to leave the company silently or complain on public platforms, such as social media sites, to other employers, or, in the worst cases, to clients. These behaviors could damage the reputation of the company and create a bad service experience for customers.
Failing to Meet Expectations and Promises
Disengaged, unhappy employees do not work with full commitment to customer satisfaction. While it is the company that makes the commitment to clients, on the ground level, it is the employees who fulfill the commitment. How can you expect disengaged employees to put in the right effort to fulfill commitments to customers?
No business leader can ignore the human factors to the job.
A change in attitude is essential to deliver exceptional customer experience, and in case of dissension, to make peace with customers and employees.
It requires companies to build capabilities around operational visibility, employee performance, and activity tracking and monitoring. There are already many tools available to empower your business, however, in this case, the focus should be on employee enablement.
Along with developing your own capabilities around operational visibility and employee engagement, it is necessary to empower employees to make the right decisions. Creating an environment of instant communication and effective collaboration is necessary for improving the employee experience. An environment where employees' voices are heard and quick action will be taken needs to be assured.
Avee Mittal is product marketing manager at FieldCircle, a field service technology consulting company.