The Customer Experience starts with your staff

Employees are the number one tools in creating great customer service. Of course the customer experience is a mixture of various operational aspects, but the best starting place for improvements is with employees.

Your employees are the first and last human interaction customers will feel. Customers sense dedication to the company’s brand through their employees. Take a look at Zappos, whose employee dedication, training, and service is world-renowned. Zappos employees make the brand. Their dedication and excitement to deliver the best service is their mantra. Customers feel the mantra and desire to be part of an organization that truly works together. Your employees can create the same enticing environment, but it has to start from within the organization.

There were two great articles on customer service this week. Tammy Erickson for the Harvard Business Journal published a great piece on how employee’s job skills make all the difference in regards to quality service. Erickson uses her personal experience of bank employees in ability to deliver quality service due to lack of job knowledge. Businesses can easily end up focusing on all the add-ons, such as coffee, decor, promotions, for their customer experience program and end up forgetting the most important, which is delivering quality product or service. Regardless of how beautiful your showcase is, or the free donuts served, if your customers are not getting quality service from your employees, the experience will end badly.

The other article was written buy Brenna Fisher for Success Magazine. Fisher discusses the importance of creating a connection with the customer. Lasting connections usually involve an employee going out of their way to make the customer feel important or provide high quality service. Employees’ sense of dedication and service to customers must come from within the organization. The retailer, bank or pharmacy needs to hold the deep belief from within the organization that the most imprint duty is the customer care.

Employees are your ultimate tools in customer experience management. The more trained and knowledgeable your employees are on products, services, and job duties, the better care your customers will receive. Measuring your employees’ interactions with customers via mystery shopping, or as it’s sometimes called, secret shopping, is an amazing way to foster belief in customer experience. Instead of measuring to point out the defaults or reprimand, measure to find out areas where employees could use some additional training or scenario development assistance.

Employees will follow the guidance of their organization. If it’s a primary actionable goal to continually improve customer experience, employees will follow and your customers will feel it. Your employees are the gateway to creating an amazing customer experience.