The Impact of Employee Engagement on Customer Success
Publié le 19 April 2024
It’s important for employers and business leaders to understand the impact of employee engagement on customer success.
While there are many product-centric industries, customers don’t always buy from the first or the cheapest vendors. Sometimes, it’s the effort of your employees, and the level of employee engagement that directly impacts customer satisfaction.
While the only way to achieve this is through exceptional employee training, there are two things you need to understand to even get to this stage.
- First, you need to create a roadmap and figure out what your possibilities are when it comes to this kind of onboarding.
- Second, you need to understand why this happens. This will help you understand why it’s such a priority and what you can do to make a difference.
Simply put, you want your employees to try harder.
For this to work, you have to understand your employees on a much deeper level. You’ll have to understand the significance of work-life balance and intrinsic motivation. The biggest challenge is creating a workplace environment that meets their needs, and motivates them to push themselves to excel continually
With that in mind and without further ado, here’s what we know about the impact of employee engagement on customer success (in completing the purchase) and what you can do to make it work in your favor.
1. Funneling the process from one stage to another
The first thing you need to understand is that the customer lifecycle implies the motion of customers through various stages, each of which connects them with your business in a different way.
When you think about customer interaction, most likely, what you’re imagining is your sales representative (maybe even a customer support representative) communicating with the customer. While this is sometimes the case, it’s just what you see on the front end.
Regardless of whether you’re crafting this experience manually or using helpdesk software to create a funnel,
The thing is that their first interaction with your brand (the first stage of the customer lifecycle) starts off the site. It starts either in their search box (which makes it the responsibility of your SEO) or somewhere on social media (where they encounter a piece of your content or your offer). In some cases, the first contact takes place in their inbox.
Regardless of whether this, first contact happens as a result of your:
- Social media strategy
- SEO effort
- Email marketing
The truth remains that it’s your marketing team that will make the first contact. Then, they’ll send them to your website, where your IT team will have a chance to shine. If they have any questions (and they will), they’ll be directed to your customer support or reached out to by your sales representatives.
As you can see, this is a team effort, and that’s the main reason you have to hire team players. While employee engagement sounds like an individual effort, it’s everything but. It’s about every member of your team understanding their role in this larger scheme of things.
2. The truth about employee engagement
Now that we’ve disclosed the importance of employee engagement, it’s time to face some uncomfortable truths. First of all, roughly 23% of all employees are engaged at work, while roughly 59% of them are doing their bare minimum instead of aspiring to provide quality service.
The biggest problem with this is that you, as an employer, probably have a different idea of how this works. An employee resigns from their role, so you look for someone to replace them. While terminating the employment of people who do the bare minimum can occur, the truth is that the most engaged employees are the most ambitious ones. Their replacement may not be so engaged.
This means that your collective workforce power goes beyond the sum of employees. An employee leaving and someone taking their place is not always a sum neutral.
There’s only so much you can learn from their customer service resume, seeing as how there are so many ways to enhance and embellish it. CV-writing skills will drastically impact your chances of getting hired, and if you know how to ace an interview, your chances are boosted even further.
While blindspots in the hiring process are discovered as early as the onboarding or employee training stage, the truth is that sometimes, you won’t know until much later in the process. Sometimes, it will take weeks and months for your employees to truly show what they’re made of.
It’s also important that you set fair parameters when evaluating employee engagement. Even the most engaged employee won’t give their 100% all the time. Expecting this of them will only make them burn out and leave. While performance and engagement are undoubtedly high priorities, you also can’t ignore the importance of work-life balance.
3. Encouraging employee engagement
Accepting these low numbers (29%) is a choice that you can’t afford to make. So, you need to find a way to motivate your employees to give their best. The fact that the numbers were higher historically and that this figure varies across the globe indicates that there are many factors affecting it. This also means that there are options and strategies that give better results.
Some just try to patch the problem through employee training, but you have to go beyond that.
Remember that you’re working with a predominantly young demographic, which means that you need an innovative approach to the situation. One of the tricks that are known to work especially well is the gamification of work-related tasks.
By organizing leaderboards, encouraging the culture of healthy competition, and giving all of these tasks a joyful tone, you can make quite a bit of a difference. Remember, you don’t want them to try harder in order to make you profit (this is not something that will ever motivate them). You want them to feel challenged and spark their innate desire to win. This could impact their intrinsic motivation in a major way.
Moreover, by encouraging employee engagement you foster a sense of ownership and commitment within the team, driving productivity through enhanced collaboration and innovation. This heightened team productivity translates to improved customer satisfaction, as engaged employees are more dedicated to delivering exceptional service and tailored solutions that meet customer needs effectively.
You also want to focus on the employee experience.
A lot has been said about customer experience and customer satisfaction; however, the topic of employee experience has seldom been researched. This is even more tragic and paradoxical when you take into consideration the fact that customer satisfaction directly depends on employee engagement (which is conditioned by their experience). For instance, roughly 91% of employees who received a consistently positive employee experience reported higher engagement levels.
Lastly, you want to cultivate inspiring leadership within your organization. This will have a positive impact on more than just engagement. It will also increase employee loyalty and reduce your retention rate.
4. Why aren’t they more engaged?
One of the main objectives behind employee training is the idea that skill is a bottleneck to providing the highest quality of service to your employees. This is often not the case.
Sometimes, your employees know exactly what’s expected of them. They also understand how to do it (some are even quite proficient at it); they just can’t be bothered to actually do it.
Why?
Well, because they don’t want to. Sometimes, because they feel like they don’t need to, as long as this is outside of those minimum requirements, it’s completely up to them whether they’ll make an effort.
Employees working on a commission will try their hardest to close a sale, but not all of your employees are profit-driven. There are some who will feel like they’ve made enough money this week and will just stop putting as much effort into it. In their mind, they prioritize their work-life balance and feel like working too much would hurt their morale or mental health.
One key obstacle to employee engagement is the belief that their efforts aren’t recognized. This is not just a problem, but an opportunity since roughly 69% of employees feel that if their efforts were recognized, they would be willing to work harder.
Sometimes, employees feel like they’re one in a sea of others, and their work doesn’t make a difference. This is especially prominent among millennials and younger generations, who want more than just to make money. They want to make a difference. Trusting them with an opportunity to do so will give a huge return.
Understanding your employees is the key to increasing their engagement
Employees who try harder are irreplaceable. However, don’t look for some mythical overachievers to come rolling down the hill eager to enlist with you. Instead, work with what you’ve got. Try to understand your employees better and figure out what roadblocks and bottlenecks are in helping them increase their engagement.
Understand how to measure their engagement and pay special attention to their work-life balance. Remember, you’re in it for a marathon, not a race. Individual customers come and go, but having the right team will always resonate strongly with your customer base.
