Beware: Are YOU on Your Employees’ Naughty List?

Your employees have the power to make or break your Customer Experience this holiday season with the customer service they provide. However, when employees aren’t happy, customer service often suffers. It’s clear that keeping a positive work environment is crucial this holiday season, and all year long.

Here are three proven ways you can stay off your employees’ Naughty list when it comes to their employee experience.

Remember the Nordstrom Way

Nordstrom department stores, renowned for their devotion to customer service, provide an exemplary Customer Experience. However, they also provide an excellent Employee Experience. Career Bliss, an online career community, recently released a report that said the happiest retail employees work at Nordstrom. (Other retailers in the top ten for happy employees included: Best Buy, J.C. Penney, Home Depot, Walgreens, AutoZone, Lowe’s, Toys R Us, The Gap and Ross Stores.) Career Bliss determined the three factors that contribute to this employee happiness:

• Existence of a positive work environment
• Opportunity for career growth
• Good relationship with senior management

It would be wise to review these three elements in your employee engagement strategy.

Train them a lot more than you do now

Hiring well and presenting a comprehensive orientation are two critical parts of starting off with a great employee experience. Unfortunately, at the start is where many organizations stop. They might train on systems or operational tasks, but there is no additional training beyond the initial new-hire regimen. Except, of course, when changing those systems or operations. Or, perhaps, when there is a less than exemplary annual review.

However, when you invest in training your employees, they tend to respond with more investment in the company mission. Training can include new skills, new certifications, or new concepts. As Customer Experience Consultants, we propose training that improves your employees’ understanding of all the factors that affect the Customer Experience (the rational, emotional, subconscious and psychological experiences).

Support them with sound systems

All the best and brightest recruiters and robust Customer Experience training in the world can’t help a broken system. If your system doesn’t support employees in their day-to-day work, and you don’t include them in the process to develop their systems, you aren’t likely to achieve the results you need.

In our Customer Experience Consultancy, we emphasize taking an outside-in approach to your systems, to see how they make you feel as a customer. If they are great efficiency and cost-saving systems that completely baffle and bewilder your customers, then your systems are useless. At the very least, they are inefficient and expensive systems when you calculate the value lost from the customers you disappoint with them. And guess who faces the angry hordes your systems create this holiday season? That’s right, your employees. Everyone is in a better place when the systems support the employees so they can provide the best Customer Experience possible.

It’s the season of giving and receiving. All this happy exchanging of goods and services involves more than a little customer service, which is a vital part of your Customer Experience. However, if your employee experience isn’t great, your customer experience probably won’t be either. The most immediate way poor employee experience manifests is in poor customer service, which isn’t good for anybody’s holiday cheer.

So, the question is when your employees are making their nice and naughty list this year, which column will you be in? I will let you in on a little secret: it will be the column your customers will put you in, too!