How To Motivate Employees To Give Good Customer Service

Keeping your support employees happy and motivated is disquisitional to your business concern' success. Here's how to practice it.

The battle for a customer'southward lifetime loyalty is, very often, won at the margins.

The company whose squad showed that client that they're willing to go just that piddling fleck extra for them.

That feeling that a company cares? Customers will pay more for that.

86% more, in fact, according to a 2011 Oracle written report.

Delivering that picayune bit of extra service requires a little bit of extra piece of work.

Part of making certain that extra piece of work gets done is hiring amazing customer service employees.

The other role is keeping them motivated.

Here are iii easy means to keep your support team happy (and happy to work difficult).

1) Appreciation

Glassdoor, a career site, asked more than ii,000 people about what motivates them to work harder.

The leading answer?

Appreciation. In fact, appreciation was cited more twice every bit often as the second most common response.

81 percent of employees said that they're motivated to work harder when their boss shows appreciation for their work.

And while we might recollect we'd work harder if nosotros were more than appreciated, is it actually true?

Another study suggests that the answer is absolutely.

In 2010, researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Due north Carolina set up out to study the touch of gratitude on people'due south behavior.

Participants were asked to requite feedback on a fictional pupil's ("Eric") embrace alphabetic character.

After the feedback was received, the participants got a reply asking for feedback on a second cover letter.

Half of the participants got a straight, to-the-point email with the second asking, while the other half got an e-mail expressing gratitude for completing the first review.

The results?

32% of the "No Gratitude" grouping provided feedback on the 2d cover letter, while 66% of the "Gratitude" grouping sent more than feedback.

Gratitude more than doubled the response charge per unit.

Gratitude and appreciation don't just experience good; they tin motivate your employees to perform.

2) Foster (Friendly) Competition

When used properly, contest tin can deliver tremendous results for a team'due south performance.

To run into what I hateful, check out this story about steel magnate Charles Schwab motivated his employees (excerpted from Dale Carnegie'south How To Win Friends and Influence People).

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Charles Schwab had a factory manager whose people weren't producing their quota of work.

"How is it," Schwab asked him, "that a manager as capable as y'all can't make this manufacturing plant turn out what it should?"

"I don't know," the managing director replied. "I've coaxed the men, I've pushed them, I've sworn and cussed, I've threatened them with damnation and beingness fired. Merely cypher works. They just won't produce."

This chat took place at the terminate of the day, simply before the nighttime shift came on.

Schwab asked the manager for a slice of chalk, then, turning to the nearest man, asked: "How many heats did your shift make today?"

"6."

Without another word, Schwab chalked a large effigy six on the floor, and walked away.

When the nighttime shift came in, they saw the "6" and asked what it meant.

"The big boss was in here today," the day people said. "He asked united states how many heats we made, and we told him six. He chalked information technology down on the floor."

The next morning time Schwab walked through the manufacturing plant again. The night shift had rubbed out "6" and replaced it with a big "7."

When the day shift reported for piece of work the next morning, they saw a big "7" chalked on the floor. So the dark shift thought they were better than the 24-hour interval shift did they? Well, they would show the night shift a affair or two. The crew pitched in with enthusiasm, and when they quit that dark, they left behind them an enormous, swaggering "x." Things were stepping upwards.

Soon this mill, which had been lagging way behind in production, was turning out more piece of work than any other mill in the constitute.

One important takeaway for managers that's not to be missed: note Schwab's tact. He didn't gear up a new production quota (which can really demotivate employees), or tell the team that their jobs depended on how they performed compared to their peers.

He merely set the phase for some friendly competition, and let human nature accept over and exercise the rest.

3) Get Your Hands Dingy

Customer service is not an easy job.

But information technology's an absolutely essential part of your business organization, and one that can brand or break the way your customers feel almost you lot.

Want to motivate your support squad and get deep insights virtually your customer experience?

Get your hands muddied and spend fourth dimension on the front lines.

Many companies, including Zappos, Amazon, Craigslist and Rackspace practice "anybody does support," a model that calls on all employees to spend time responding to support tickets and engaging with customers.

You'll non only get a better appreciation for what your customer service squad does — and build a better relationship with your support employees — but yous'll go potentially business organisation-changing insights about your product that you'd never get from hearing customer concerns second-manus.

Nosotros all benefit from being in touch with customers. For case, as an engineer it can be very powerful to see first-paw a customer struggling with a problems.