Employee Satisfaction Is the Best Way to Get Customer Satisfaction

As a business leader, you know you want customer satisfaction.  And, in this complex, ever changing world, you may not know how to get it.  One thing is for certain, employee satisfaction leads to customer satisfaction.

It makes sense when you think about it. Happy employees treat customers with more enthusiasm and more care. They represent the company enthusiastically. And people like dealing with people who are clearly having a good time! Employee satisfaction naturally leads to customer satisfaction.

How Great Can an Employee Experience Be When It’s Virtual?

According to employees? Better than when it’s in person.

FlexJobs, a website that has been helping people find flexible, remote work opportunities since 2007, conducted a survey of over 2000 employees about one year into the pandemic. One of the most profound findings was that the employees felt their working remotely from home had led to better mental health and improved productivity, both key elements of a satisfying experience. 

As far as working with their colleagues goes, USA Today reported in November 2021 that 70% of respondents in their survey say they’ve found attending virtual meetings far less stressful than being in an office alongside their colleagues.

FlexJobs’ survey agrees, pointing out that 97% of workers want some form of remote work post-pandemic.

What Is it Going to Take?

With 44% of companies still forbidding work-from-home (WFH), 16% have already declared they will never return to their former offices. The fact that 85% of managers surveyed agree it’s the new normal strongly suggests this currently smaller group will soon outgrow those refusing to adopt WFH.

Companies who report having moved their IT operations to the cloud prior to the pandemic also report having a much easier time making the transition, suggesting that technology will be a major determinant of continued success in remote working. 

The first, foremost, and most elemental issue in this success is trust. Managers must come to trust that their people are actually working when they’re working from home. Not watching television or otherwise goofing off. Many of these managers seem to believe the old axiom that, “the farmer’s shadow is the best fertilizer.” If the manager isn’t casting a shadow on his people, like a farmer casting a shadow on his crops, they’ll never grow. 

Similarly, employees must trust that their employers will not terminate their employment simply because they haven’t seen them lately. Out-of-sight may mean out-of-mind in their estimation. 

The right solution to provide, maintain, and improve this trust is powerful workflow automation. Make it possible for the manager to issue assignments, for the employees to receive them, act on them, and report their status until completion on each one. This automated, documented exchange of assignment and assurances documents the satisfaction of both party’s needs. 

A Customer Satisfaction Framework

Gartner provides a Customer Experience (CX) Pyramid whose framework provides excellent direction in growing a far more engaged employee experience. 

Communication Level – At the foundation is the communication of useful, valuable information using preferred channels at the right time.

Responsive Level – Employees and customers experience great satisfaction when their problems are resolved quickly and efficiently. 

Commitment Level – Employees and customers feel best when they know they are appreciated and valued, and that their company is listening to and understanding their needs.

Proactive Level – Employees and customers are most impressed when their company gets in front of challenges and other concerns. 

Evolution Level – When they feel better, safer, more powerful or more in control, employees and customers enjoy maximum satisfaction.

Communication Technology

When managers, employees, and customers are physically separated from each other, the quality of the communication networks connecting them becomes critical. They need to know they can find people they need to contact quickly, connect with them easily, and communicate in whatever modes they prefer. Texting, voice, video, screen-share, whichever enables the greatest productivity.

These systems must also be reliable, resilient, and secure. The linkages involved go from customer to company employees to company executive management and then back again. 

Contact Center/Call Center – For a company who has traditionally deployed salespeople in the field, the best solution may be the construction of a high-quality contact center capable of supporting a high volume of outgoing calling as well as inbound traffic. All customer data should be instantly available to the call agent upon connection. Today’s call center and contact center technology is exploding with new features and capabilities.

Collaboration & Communication Platform – The remote employee literally lives on their collaboration & communication platform. They readily switch from texting to voice call, even adding video and other content without ever leaving the connection. Everything is available at a click. 

Broadcast at Your Fingertips – Larger companies with larger customer bases especially acknowledge the importance of having a strong “one-to-many” strategy for communicating key messages quickly to large communities of customers and associates. Today’s messaging technology makes this disarmingly simple, even for the most casual of computer users.

Protecting Customers, Employees, and Their Data – As more and more of the discourse of day-to-day business crosses the internet, the need to protect all that data and those users becomes enormous. With everyone working from home companies need a strategy for providing that protection in a distributed fashion yet with complete central control. This is the driving force behind Gartner’s development of the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) model which marries network and security technologies delivered from the cloud to all connected nodes. As work continues to evolve into an activity rather than a place to go, security and compliance strategies will become even more of a paramount concern.

Don’t Deliberate — Discuss!!

Hopefully we’ve given you much to think about as you gaze into the post-pandemic abyss. This is not a journey you should attempt alone. Talk to our team at Packet Fusion and let us be your guide to your best digital future.