23 February, 2022
A Brief Guide on Employee Appreciation for Your Customer Support Teams
Customer support is crucial to customer satisfaction, retention and in turn, loyalty. But often, customer service teams are among the least visible and appreciated part of an organization. With heightened customer expectations and steep targets to live up to, these executives work in a high-pressure, low gratitude environment. Coupled with erratic work hours and the emotional drain associated with accepting criticism and negative feedback, it’s a veritable pool of disaster unless organizations step up to actively mitigate burnout and dissatisfaction among them.
Reward and recognition programs targeted towards all employees in an organization often fail to address the special needs of this group. The need of the hour is to offer visibility and appreciation for their work, facilitate interpersonal bonds and ultimately link their achievements to an organization’s larger goals. As this McKinsey study clearly states, engaged customer support agents feel 3.3X more empowered to resolve customer queries and 4X more likely to stay with an organization compared to their disengaged peers.
Setting up an effective appreciation engine is crucial to ensure that a consistent employee experience is delivered to all customer service agents, irrespective of their work location. A digital R&R provider can assist with this endeavor through the following steps:
- Making recognition accessible through an integrated R&R software
Every high-quality interaction with customers deserves to be recognized promptly to instill a sense of acknowledgement and set a benchmark for performance. Integration with CRM and other work systems can enable achievement to be highlighted in real-time. Automated notifications to managers through email, SMS, WhatsApp, Slack or Teams integrations can further reinforce a habit of recognition.
- Offering a vast catalog of relevant reward options along with redemption
Small perks of convenience in the form of rewards or incentives can add a glimmer of optimism to an otherwise unremarkable day in the CX department. Consider offering your agents small, incremental rewards that are commensurate to their level of impact. For example- coffee mugs for midnight shift achievers or movie tickets for those who work on holidays. These small perks cumulatively build up to an exceptional employee experience.
- Fostering camaraderie and engagement through digital tools
Gartner asserts that truly engaged customer support employees create an opportunity for differentiation. Sprucing things up with a touch of gamification can do wonders to amplifying the morale of your customer support teams. For instance, talent contests or trivia quizzes tailored and delivered through an R&R platform provide a quick and easy way to promote engagement, camaraderie, and even a bit of friendly social competition to accomplish performance goals. Other gamified features such as leaderboards can further facilitate exposure and org-wide visibility.
Any organization which hopes to increase customer loyalty must consistently maintain a high level of motivation among its customer support teams. By personalizing the rewards framework and aligning it to organizational values and mission, an employee R&R platform can give organizations a chance to give their frontline heroes their day in the limelight! As the award winning CX expert Shep Hyken stated- ‘A brand is defined by the customer’s experience. The experience is delivered by the employees.’
Connect with us to know how our digital R&R platform can help your organization achieve this feat!