Happy employees, happy customers

Mats Rennstam says utilities should redouble their efforts to ensure employees are properly engaged because it has a positive impact on customer relationships and ultimately profits.

Employee engagement is something of a mystery because everyone has different motivators. However, employee surveys show three common themes of driving engagement: achievement, recognition and development.

In utility companies’ customer service (CS) departments, where most customer interactions happen and therefore the biggest impact on your brand happens, managers are all working on improving these areas. However, there are two things continually hindering them achieving the results they are after.

First, the company-wide staff satisfaction surveys in place are not relevant to the CS staff. They are often too long and do not focus on what is important in the CS world. Nor is the result fed back to the staff, making them less likely to fill in the forms next time. Many organisations conduct employee satisfaction surveys annually and some even every other year, which may only have two or three questions focused on the issues that really matter, and results are delivered in some cases after six months, by which time the employee may have left.

Second there is one specific additional reason driving down engagement that is out of the hands of the managers: system support. Even in today’s world, 62 per cent of the CS workforce across the UK say the systems in place hinder them from providing a good or even ok customer experience.

The link to bottom line

Many consultancies have been able to show the correlation between an engaged workforce and company profits. Providing your chief executive with direct proof of the impact on bottom line (and thus securing funding for better engagement programmes), is getting easier and easier. Providing clients with matrix graphs showing staff engagement linked to NPS (net promoter scores) of them individually enables calculations of what impact on NPS (and thus profit) an improvement on staff engagement will have.

The leadership within a company can go a long way to keeping employees happy and engaged. Do you regularly check up on your employees to make sure they are satisfied, and enjoying themselves? Do you make sure that they know their contributions are welcome in the decision-making process?

Showing employees that you care can facilitate a happier work environment, and in customer-facing departments like call centres this positive atmosphere will then be prevalent in customer interaction

Performance and engagement

As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest drivers of engagement is achievement. It is human nature to want to do a good job and then get recognition for it. By putting in place a well-thought-out structure for performance, you can ensure that your employees understand the work they are doing is important in the context of the company. Setting realistic goals can work to this effect, fostering a sense of purpose across your company.

This all comes down to building a culture of pride in performance, which will permeate through your organisation. When you have the key to producing this sentiment, you will also unlock the door to an improved customer experience through consistently high service standards. It is almost magical how this culture of respect can also surface in the customer experience as a result. When employees are safe in the knowledge that their own voice is respected within their company, you will be amazed at how this can lead to them having a high regard for the voice of the customer, as part of their customer value set.

Measuring engagement

Putting together an employee engagement survey is straightforward. By using a similar methodology to your customer survey process, you can measure engagement month-on-month, year-on-year against previous scores. If you can benchmark this insight against your peers and across industry, even better.

Monitoring achievement, recognition and development, the three key drivers of motivation, means that you can then drive the right behaviours to deliver business success.

It is important to avoid survey fatigue, so we would encourage companies to look at the following areas: general satisfaction; recognition; achievement; support; knowledge; and engagement.

By surveying staff on a regular basis with a series of thee or four questions behind each area, the volume of data enables correlations and trends to be identified. What is more, asking staff to leave comments allows you to pull out great ideas, understand common challenges and map out focus areas for development.

What we have seen across most employee engagement techniques is that communication is key. Never stop talking, enquiring and listening to your employees – after all, they are your greatest asset. Never let the line of communication between your workforce and your management team be broken.

As long as you stick by this golden rule of employee engagement, you stand a better chance of seeing this positive company environment have knock-on effects in other areas of your business, including the customer experience, brand and bottom line.