Customer service employees can offer important insights about customer experiences.
It doesn’t matter how you perceive your brand. What matters is how your customer perceives it.
For instance, if you work for an athletic wear company, you might associate your brand with fitness, health and wellness, and people who play sports.
However, your customers may purchase from you because they associate your brand with leisure, comfort, and attractiveness. So, you should align your marketing with those values as well.
Your customer service team can answer many of these probing questions for you. Rather than spending time and money surveying customers constantly, you can have your customer service employees simply ask these questions while interacting with customers. Their response can give you many insights into improving your products, marketing, goals, and employee training.
The more you improve the customer experience, the harder your employees will work. Research shows that companies that invest in customer experience also see employee engagement rates increase by an average of 20%.
Happy customer service employees will create happy customers.
Studies consistently show that happy employees are good for business. For example, recent research that studied customer service employees in a call center setting reported that happy employees were 13% more productive.
Despite this fact, not enough companies take employee satisfaction seriously—particularly in the case of customer service employees. According to our 2022 State of Customer Service report, almost 40% of customer service leaders say that their company views customer service as an expense rather than a driver for growth.
Companies can support their customer service team with the resources, technology, and respect they need to get more happy customers. When customer service staff are equipped to do their jobs well, they are more comfortable and motivated, and your customers are too. (Amaresan, 2024).
When looking into feedback about a company’s customer service, it is more commonly seen that they get feedback from their customers. While that may be expected to hear back from the user, what can we learn from the employees’ perspective? I think the customer service employees’ viewpoint can be overlooked, despite its potential to be valuable to improving the service experience. The customer service employees are the ones providing the service and interacting with customers firsthand. Their perspective of service is completely different from the customers, but still relates to the business and can shine a light on places that could improve even before a customer has an issue. Not every customer is going to voice their concerns, so turning to the employees to see what the customer may need can benefit the business. Another thing this article talks about is keeping the employees happy. While the employees should always remain professional despite their mood, it is easier to be helpful and cheerful to customers when feeling the same. Keeping in mind that employees are humans that feel too and looking into how that affects the customer service provided is definitely a perspective that needs to be researched more.
References.
Amaresan, S. (2024, July). Why customer service is important: 16 data-backed facts to know in 2024. HubSpot. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/importance-customer-service
