Learn why employees need more attention

The secret to creating lasting customer experiences is to identify and address the areas of improvement for employees in the frontline.

Premise for improvement
If your front-line employees are not equipped with the proper tools, recommendations and feedback to better serve your customers, how can they be expected to even improve their work?

Logical, you think. So,  

• Why do most companies continue to focus on investments in IT, telephone systems and infrastructure, and not to the people that really matter?
  
  
• Why are team managers not trained better to coach front-line employees?
  
  
• Why should more companies focus on employee motivation and retention by providing a more holistically sound work environment for them? 

Having worked with numerous large organizations over the years, we at TeleFaction have seen our share of bad cases.  In fact, we do understand why so many organizations lack the people/employee focus.  Quite often we find that organizations simply do not possess the effective tools needed to monitor, measure and evaluate groups or individual employees on a continuous basis.  The process of coaching and training employees then becomes inefficient and time-consuming.  Expectedly, setting up the program that will improve the performance quality of each individual customer service or sales representative becomes nearly impossible.

Learn from the front-runners
No matter how excellent your systems and your marketing efforts are to gain and retain customers, these will only be nullified if your front line employees are not equipped to provide them with quality customer experience.   

The case studies on an insurance company and an oil/energy company, demonstrate how innovative front-runners successfully focused on educating and motivating employees by utilizing monitoring systems concentrated on behavior every day. These Return on Behavior assets have enabled those companies to constantly monitor, measure and evaluate teams, as well as individual employees. 

The result is an ability to constantly improve front line performance, as team leaders or coaches follow up as soon as a discrepancy is spotted. One of the most powerful and unique benefits is the ability to react fast, as opposed to the traditional, and now rendered ineffective approach of handling the exact same situation. 

Employee satisfaction
One might wonder how employees react to increased "surveillance".  In the case of the two companies mentioned above, employee reactions have been very positive.  When employees understand the objective of such monitoring systems, they are able to understand their important role in providing quality customer service.  Contrary to common assumptions the vast majority of employees actually want to perform better.  

Specifically in the case of the oil/energy company, cross-sales efforts were increased by double digit numbers in a matter of weeks. You can probably imagine what that means in terms of added sales.

This article will be continued in the October issue of Return on Behavior Magazine. If you still have not signed up - please do so now. It is free.