Why Customer Satisfaction Starts With HR
Gone are the days when customer satisfaction is viewed as the sales team’s job. This notion is outdated, and presently, successful companies acknowledge the influential role HR plays in establishing a customer-centric culture.
Experts are essential, but customer service is arguably the most important and deciding factor in a business’s survival and long-term success. From hiring and coaching to evaluation programs, HR activities provide employees with the tools to develop and maintain strong, lasting relationships with customers while selling and marketing your services unique points and value in the marketplace.
How HR Impacts Your Bottom Line
Even though we know HR is not a recognized profit center in an organization, it touches all areas and can nurture HR processes and people programs. This can improve company culture, employee satisfaction and thereby increasing corporate revenue.
We’ve all had a terrible experience with a customer service professional that has left us screaming out loud, “I will never buy your products/services again! I am taking my business to the competition.” In today’s competitive market, we need to avoid those experiences altogether, and HR can be your fairy godmother.
Even minor changes in people programs can have drastic impacts on customer satisfaction. For instance, by training your customer service representatives with more technical expertise, they can solve deeper issues instead of redirecting them to another tier of service. The customers will naturally be happier and more satisfied as their issue got resolved quickly. With the quick service, your customer will remain loyal and satisfied. Even during times of uncertainty and hardship, your business can still stand firm with a strong customer service team.
On the contrary, if your customer service representatives provide lousy service, this can leave your clients feeling angry and frustrated, potentially boycotting your business. With this comes having to invest more time in replacing lost clients instead of growing the existing ones. And that is not the worst of it.
Studies have shown the cost of acquiring new clients is five times higher than the cost of maintaining existing clients. See how defective customer service can grow into this monster that’s difficult to tame, eating into your profits? You don’t want to imagine the effects of a bearish economy or aggressive competition.
How Effective HR Contributes To The Success Of Your Business
HR ensures people with the right qualities and ideal personalities can successfully make customers happy. The ability to listen, be optimistic and solution-oriented while handling stress are perfect customer service professionals’ attributes. From developing standardized psychological tests to close observation of people’s personalities, HR has that uncanny superpower to cut through the fakeness.
Employee Training
Even with having the right team, employees still need training and guidance to transform these good qualities into assets that will allow them to excel at maintaining excellent relationships with customers. HR saves the day again by utilizing self-awareness tools such as the Myers-Briggs Assessment, which helps the employee to understand their communication style. With this new awareness, HR can provide training or outsource training to help connect that with key principles of active listening, de-escalating conflict, and non-verbal body language.
Employee To Customer Satisfaction
With being the epicenter of culture, HR has a heavy hand in overseeing and maintaining a healthy environment. When you think about relationships, the first step to building solid relationships with customers is your employees’ good internal relationships.
Studies have shown there is a strong connection between customer and employee satisfaction.
Employee retention and loyalty are crucial issues, and interestingly, good customer relationships have a substantial effect on these metrics.
For example, it’s no surprise that there can be higher turnover in customer-centric roles. Still, the cost of this can be detrimental to the consistency and continuity your clients are expecting. A study by the Society of Human Resources Management states that the average cost to hire an employee is $4,129 and takes about 42 days on average to fill a position. 42 days?! That is a long time to have a customer service member missing on your team. In that period, many conversations that would have been easy can end in an unpleasant experience that you don’t want for your clients. That authentic connection that is a key differentiator for you in the market will slowly erode, and your customers will feel it.
Employee satisfaction is a significant factor in providing excellent customer service as customer service representatives will naturally model and copy the behaviors exhibited internally. You can guess what they will be like to customers if management treats them in a hostile manner. Autocratic and tense workplace culture will lead to cold customer service. Yeah, not a great experience. On the flip side, when there is camaraderie and positivity in the business culture, there is a very good chance customers will be happy. HR has the massive task of ensuring your business does not derail keeping its positive energy as one wrong move can destroy all that you have worked for over the years.
In this digital age where bad information spreads like wildfire, you publicly don’t want dissatisfied customers ranting about your lousy customer service. One negative tweet or Instagram post and a dip in revenue are almost inevitable. You need to understand the power HR holds as being the differentiator in selecting, engaging, connecting, and empowering your biggest asset, your employees.