Improving Customer Satisfaction: The Benefits of Employee Empowerment

Welcome to the Insiders Podcast, where we explore the strategies and tactics for improving your bottom line. I’m your host, Mark Hebblewhite, and today we’ll be talking about the benefits of employee empowerment and how it can improve customer satisfaction.

What is Employee Empowerment?

Employee empowerment is a hot topic in business today, but what exactly is it and how can it benefit your company and your customers? So, let’s dive in. Employee empowerments can be defined as giving employees the authority and the resources to make decisions, solve problems and take ownership of their work.

Why is Employee Empowerment important?

This can lead to increased job satisfaction, motivation and engagement among employees. And we know when employees are satisfied and motivated, they’re more likely to provide high quality service to customers. This can result in improved customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty, but how exactly does employee empowerment lead to improved customer satisfaction?

Let’s look at some specific ways. First of all, empowered employees are more likely to be able to handle customer complaints and issues in a very timely and effective manner. This is something every business wants – that they have the authority to make decisions and solve problems, which means they can quickly resolve the customer’s concerns without having to escalate them to the manager in turn, saving time.

Secondly, empowered employees are more likely to take a personalised approach to customer service. They’re empowered to use their own discretion and judgments to provide the best possible customer experience. Which can lead to an increase in customer satisfaction. Finally, empowered employees are more likely to be engaged and motivated, which can translate into more positive, enthusiastic attitudes when dealing with customers. This can have a huge impact on customer satisfaction and perception of your company.

Handling Complaints

Let’s take a look at a real-life example of how employee empowerment can improve customer satisfaction. Our case study today is about a large retail chain. That implemented an employee empowerment program. Prior to implementing the program, the retail chain was facing a high rate of customer complaints and low customers’ satisfaction scores.

However, after training their employees – to be more empowered and giving them the resources and authority to make decisions – the retail chain saw a dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction. You know, it’s always interesting to see the results, and quite funny on how I’m always surprised by how well implementing a customer satisfaction program works across teams and customers.

The employees are now able to handle the customer complaints and issues more efficiently. And they were able to provide a more personalised approach to the customer service. This led obviously into an increase in customer satisfaction and a significant decrease in the number of customer complaints. So how did the retail chain go about implementing the employee empowerment program?

Train Your Employees

You know, we all put processes within our businesses and customer services no different. However, the retail chain had to re-examine this specific process and identify the areas they could empower their employees to make the decisions and provide a better service. After gauging their results, the company provided comprehensive training to their employees, teaching them the skills they needed to effectively handle customer complaints and take ownership of their work.

The training also included information on the company’s policies and procedures, as well as the resources and support available to the employees after the training. The retail train provided its employees with the necessary tools, such as access to customer feedback and complaints data. This enabled them to make more informed decisions.

Team Work & Collaboration

The company also encouraged employees to share their ideas and suggestions. For improving customer service and implementing those that showed promise. We’re talking about the frontline support and what they’re actually getting on a sort of daily basis is, is feedback from customers. So, their suggestions on how to improve is incredibly important to listen to. Being at the top of the business, you can’t really know everything, every conversation that is happening within customer services. Yeah, you’ll get the managers giving an overview, but opening up the doors for the employees to give you ideas and feedback, that’s amazing for any business to grow. This enables the business to regularly evaluate the performance of its employees and provide feedback and coaching to help them continually improve.

The company has also monitored customer satisfaction scores and use CIS data to make ongoing improvements to its employees’ empowerment program. And as you can see from the results, this approach to employee empowerment was highly effective in improving customer satisfaction for this specific retail chain.

Obviously, I would recommend implementing this in any customer facing business. Well, that’s all for today’s episodes of the E-Commerce Insiders Podcast. Thank you for listening. Until next time, keep working towards a better and more successful business. Our next episode will be discussing the future of customer engagement trends, technologies, and opportunities.

We would love to hear your feedback on our episodes and any questions you have about e-commerce branding and marketing, please leave your comments on our channel and we’ll do our best to address them in the future podcasts. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time on the E-Commerce Insiders Podcast.

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