How to improve your bottom line through your front line
Frontline employees, meaning your sales associates, reps, customer service executives and technicians, are the cornerstone of each company. They are the ones who are dealing with your product/service and connecting with your customers directly on a daily basis.
Typically, they are the first to spot a problem and can easily tell you what’s wrong with your company. If you cannot take advice from those who know your customers better than you do, then how can you make positive changes to your business?
So, how can you tap into your front line in order to improve your bottom line? Here at Glandore, we’ve put together helpful tips to boost your bottom line through your front line.
1. Encourage regular feedback
A study recently conducted by The Medallia Institute revealed that although 78% of surveyed employees said that their employers had made customer service a top priority within their business, 60% agreed that their recommendations for improving customer experience had been ignored.
Your employees are nearly always accurate when it comes to assessing customer satisfaction and gauging how certain processes can be changed in order to meet an optimal level of service.
Give your workers a chance to share their insights with you. However, make sure to ask the right questions when speaking to your employees. It can be easy enough to wind up asking generic questions when gathering information, so try to ask questions which are directly related to the actions of your employees. In Medallia Institute’s survey, less than half of the interviewed employees said that their executives asked relevant questions.
2. Actually implement those suggestions
There’s no point in conducting hundreds of employee surveys and taking suggestions if you’re going to ignore what they’re trying to tell you. If you’re not going to make the suggested changes, this will, in time, lead to further customer dissatisfaction.
Ignoring suggestions will also result in unhappy staff. It shows your employees that they are not valued and that your business is incapable of adapting or changing.
Acknowledging changes and suggestions by employees and customers is a sure-fire way to keep both groups happy. It shows you value their input and take on board what they say. It will also help ensure that they continue to provide feedback and suggestions, as new issues develop and the company grows.
3. Communicate before and after
You can conduct all the surveys you want, but they won’t mean much in the long run if your employees don’t know the results.
Staff will soon stop providing this much needed input if they feel that it’s going nowhere. This eventually leads to a cycle of mistrust and becomes a waste of time.
Make sure that you can quickly draft up reports based on your findings and communicate this back to those who took part. Add infographics and condense your results into simple visuals in order to make them more appealing. This way, employees can engage with the ideas which they put forward and continue to develop them.