Have you ever entered a business and felt like a bother? Everyone has had that experience at some time, and it can be really discouraging. If it happened in a store, you might have just walked out. In a medical office, you likely stayed for your appointment but might have looked for other options later. Such treatment can shake your trust in the care you receive. As an HR professional, the last thing you want is to lose customers due to unmotivated, unfriendly, or unhelpful employees. However, getting your team to be nicer can be a tricky job. Stressed or disengaged workers aren’t happy, and there’s no quick fix to make an unhappy person connect with customers. Instead, you need to use proven methods to enhance the employee experience and transform your company culture. Let’s explore how that works:

Check your employees’ stress levels

Stress leads to poor customer service, and it’s a common issue in many workplaces. Eight out of ten Americans report feeling stressed “sometimes” or “frequently” throughout their day. Additionally, a surprising 23 percent of employees claim they are “very often” or “always” stressed at work. Naturally, everyone has off days: an airline counter agent might become irritable due to exhaustion when dealing with canceled flights and a crowd of frustrated passengers. However, on a regular basis, your team shouldn’t be under so much stress that it affects their ability to be friendly and effective. Chronic stress can lead to anger, irritability, headaches, and sadness, as well as a greater risk for viruses and infections. If your workplace creates tension, it’s time to seek employee feedback and determine how to improve workflow.

On the other hand, if a worker is under stress due to family crisis or physical pain, that would call for a different approach. A company culture in which employees know that their needs are listened to will facilitate meeting individual needs.

Disengaged employees need attention

Poor customer experience can also result from employees who are disengaged from their jobs. After all, disengaged workers have a 60 percent higher rate of general errors. We all know how aggravating it is to wait at a counter for a staff person’s attention, while they continue an obviously personal phone conversation. Not all instances of disengagement are that clear-cut: It might be a customer service representative who says they’re not allowed to give you a refund, when you know they just want you to give up and go away.

Employee disengagement has many causes – a boss who is constantly micromanaging the team or two workers who have a chronic unsolved conflict. No matter the cause, it is always worsened by a lack of individual recognition. Perhaps the worker believes their hard work won’t be noticed, or they feel isolated and unappreciated by their peers. Maybe they think their supervisor doesn’t recognize their true skills, or that the company doesn’t offer any path for advancement. Did you know employee recognition was ranked number one as having the greatest impact on engagement? If you aren’t proactively finding ways to frequently recognize your team, you won’t be in a position to improve your company’s customer focus. The employee experience ultimately drives the customer experience.

Listen to your employees

In order to bring positive energy and provide support to an employee who’s having a bad time at work, you need to understand the source of the problem. “Listening to and understanding employees’ needs is the first step in supporting them,” according to Gallup research. Gallup found that “Employees whose manager is always willing to listen to their work-related problems are 62 percent less likely to be burned out.” Of course, face-to-face conversation is important, but sometimes it’s easier for a team member to speak their mind when they’re filling out a quick pulse survey. In a large enterprise, individual employees can get lost in the shuffle, and the analytics provided by your feedback software can flag someone who’s reporting that they’re having a really hard time. From there, you can open up a dialogue and work together to brainstorm creative solutions.

Creating a high-quality customer experience begins with addressing your employees’ needs. A benchmark study by Temkin Group found “Companies that outperform their competitors in both financial results and customer experience have more engaged workers.” When these researchers examined how to raise the level of employee engagement, incentives were among their top solutions. They urge managers and HR departments to “deploy appropriate systems to measure, reward, and reinforce desired employee behaviors.” Customer experience expert Blake Michelle Morgan highlights some revealing statistics in an article entitled “The Un-Ignorable Link Between Employee Experience And Customer Experience:” Employees at companies with excellent customer experience are 1 1/2 times more likely to be engaged, compared with workers at places with poor customer experience. Increasingly it’s becoming obvious that customer and employee experience “are symbiotic.”

Meet customer needs by improving the employee experience

The happier your team is, the likelier they are to make an extra effort to meet customer needs. It’s simply a straight-up fact about human relationships, and one that each of us intrinsically recognizes: When your day is going well, and you feel good about life in general, you’re a lot more motivated to reach out and help other people. To learn more about how Achievers has helped improve employee engagement for major companies such as Shop Direct and Ericsson, check out some of our case studies.

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