If your employees aren’t happy, how can you expect them to provide a good customer experience (CX)? Employee culture can come across to customers very easily. So, if an employee is sad or angry, it may be transferred into their work. Getting your culture right can only have a positive effect to your business, especially when focusing on areas such as your customer service teams, given they’re the face of your business. Forrester research has proven that companies who excel in (CX) are five times more likely to be profitable than those who don’t, so it pays to invest in your employees.

Why is high employee engagement important? 

What do you think is the one key factor linking all the top companies? The fact their employees are 50% more engaged than others in their field. This has been shown to have a knock-on effect on productivity; employees are happy to work longer hours, have a better attitude towards working, and embody the values the company represents too.

Properly trained and motivated workers are a great way to create new income and deliver a high standard of customer service (CS). But Forbes notes that one of the best ways to have an effect on the success of a business is employee engagement. It can create workers who understand the values of the business and want to portray this in their work, especially when delivering CS. Customers can learn a lot about a company from the way its operators engage with them, especially in regards to their tone and the way they present themselves.

Every employee will have their own their personal goals inside your business, so ensuring you provide them with the tools to meet those goals will keep them fully engaged. Whether that is completing a certain number of chats in a day or being promoted to webchat supervisor, make sure you know how to push your employees to be the best they can be. This ensures your workers are waking up every day and thinking “great, I’ve got work today!”

How can you improve employee engagement?  

Asking your employees to fill out regular surveys is a great way to learn how they feel towards the business. Then, using that insight, create plans to make any changes and make your employees happier thus. Alongside this, find out what your employees’ customers think of them through customer surveys, so you can review all their strengths (and weaknesses if need be). This can also be a great way to find any pain points in the CS department, like a system employees are struggling to use, for example.

If you want your workers to be happy, treat them well! Whether that’s through employee perks, such as discounts for your products or extra holidays for hard-working employees, be sure to keep them motivated. But don’t just offer them what you think will motivate them, ask them!

We all know that every person aims for different things, so don’t just offer the same motivation to everyone. It could turn out to be something as simple as buying a coffee machine for the office kitchen so they save money running to and from Costa.

What will this mean for your business? 

Improving your employee engagement will ultimately improve your CS and CX. Your employees will want to help your customers because they want the business to grow and achieve, and, in turn, achieve their own goals as part of that business. If you understand the company, you will feel responsibility when something goes wrong.

As an bonus, improving your employee engagement will also increase your workers’ likeliness to stay. Hiring a replacement can be a huge cost to your business; it can be as much as 50-60% of their annual salary to find someone. So not only can it be a huge mental loss for a business to lose an unhappy employee, let alone shake up departments, it can also come with a huge cost.

Employees who are better engaged are more productive, stay with the business for longer and give a better representation of your companies’ values. Not to mention delivering more to the customer and providing a greater return on investment. It benefits your business, your employees and your customers to invest in employee engagement.