How to Improve Customer Service Through Reward & Recognition
Excellent customer service is essential in any business, and it's a job left up to employees who may not always want to contribute 100 percent. Recognizing your employees' accomplishments and rewarding them for their efforts goes a long way in encouraging them to provide outstanding customer service. Before long it will become second nature, and you'll wind up with more satisfied customers as well as employees.
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Instructions
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Clearly Explain Expectations
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Make or use an existing customer service handbook to explain your expectations to every employee during initial job training and as a follow-up guide for any lingering questions. If they don't know exactly how you want customers to be treated, they won't realize they are not meeting expectations.
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Tell them why customer service is so important. It may seem obvious that a happy customer is a repeat customer, and that increasing customer satisfaction is a major part of an employee's job, but that's not always the case. The fact is, a satisfied customer will tell fewer people about the good experience he had than an unsatisfied customer will. Letting customers walk away unhappy opens the door for them to tell anyone who will listen not to do business with your company. Employees may not think one unhappy customer makes a difference, so educating them as to why they need to make the extra effort will help them to feel knowledgeable and encourage superior customer service efforts.
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Explain to employees the consequences of not displaying exemplary customer service skills. You can't keep people on staff who mistreat customers, and your employees would presumably like to keep their jobs. Letting them know, in a nonthreatening way, that violation of your customer service policy is grounds for letting them go shows them how important customer service is to the entire company.
Recognize and Reward
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Let employees know when they're doing a great job. Recognition doesn't have to be formal; verbal praise and encouragement go a long way in making an employee feel noticed. A simple "great job" or "you really went out of your way for that customer, thank you" is often motivation enough for an employee to up the ante and do an even better job the next time.
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Set up a formal or semiformal recognition plan. If you have full control to implement new procedures, start an employee of the month program. Use a voting system or simply keep notes and use feedback from managers or other employees to award a winner. Or invest in a bunch of five dollar gift certificates to places like Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Starbucks, or even iTunes and hand them out occasionally to employees who have gone above and beyond. This little investment could help increase customer satisfaction significantly.
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Base pay raises largely on customer service scores. Employees work to get paid. If you're not making it worth their while, many will not make the effort to serve customers in a satisfactory way. Use sales goals, mystery shop scores, customer surveys and any other applicable data combined with ratings from management to assess proper pay raises. If employees know they're being watched, rated and evaluated for raises based on how they treat customers, they'll be more likely to put in the extra effort you're looking for.
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References
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