Customer service week is almost here
…and here are 4 ideas to help you
We don’t buy into the idea of customer service week. You should be giving your customers and employees a great experience all year round. Not that people don’t appreciate a week filled with cake and balloons; but they will remember you for the former.
Having said that, Customer Service Week (7th — 11th October)is a great time to start embedding various initiatives in your organisation that you’ll want to continue beyond the week. Here are some ideas to inspire you.
Help your employees to understand why customer experience is important
Is customer experience understood at all levels in your organisation? Often, understanding is restricted to select departments, management and committees. However, your staff below are the ones who spend significant amounts of time with customers. So, they must understand the importance of great customer experiences and their role in this.
Include customer experience as a standing agenda in your meetings, team huddles and townhalls.
One of the organisations that we work with do this well: Every morning before they open their outlets, they have a standing team huddle. They use insights generated from our platform to help the teams to understand what’s working well and what needs to be changed. They also take the time to applaud employees who’ve been recognised by their customers.
Consider taking this a step further by having key customer experience metrics and any corresponding actions and initiatives communicated inside your organisation.
There’s no customer experience (CX) without employee experience (EX)
If you’re not asking your employees about their experiences with your brand, please start!
Companies cannot provide exceptional customer service without employees who are truly engaged, energised and enthused. They speak positively about your company to co-workers, potential employees, and even to your customers. They also have a sense of belonging and desire to be a part of your company; and are motivated towards success in their jobs.
They provide better customer experiences, are more productive, create a buzz within the organisation and are always thinking about how to improve your products, services and processes.
Take steps to measure the health of your organisation’s EX. Similar to CX measurement; ensure you close the loop with employees who are neither engaged, energised nor enthused; followed by a programme of actions personalised to the employee segments, along with a commitment to change.
Build employee morale
Recognise, appreciate and reward employees for delivering great customer experiences. This will help in making positive behaviours sustainable.
Use this time to initiate team building and other energising activities. You could even take this a step further and couple this with brainstorming sessions on how you can improve the customer (and employee) experience.
Your organisation probably already holds great insights into your customers and has great ideas too — you just need to tap into them!
Don’t forget about your customers (internal ones too)!
Get into the habit of collecting customer experience data, closing the loop with your customers and internal teams, and appreciating/rewarding loyalty (and continue to do this outside of customer service week too!).
We’d love to hear about your ideas that you’ve got planned and we’ll even share it here!
