Did you know that being famous for delivering a great customer experience could help you to recruit great employees? Strong customer advocacy will naturally help you attract new customers as well as people who are looking for jobs.
They’ll see the company as a place they want to work. The brilliant brand reputation is something that they'll want to be a part of – especially if they've been working at a company where this isn't the case.
But what can you do to make sure these new employees are engaged long after the interview is over?
#1 Recruit the right people and empower employees to put the customer first
It's about recruiting the right people, and showing them what matters in the business. It’s also about creating a level of belief and giving them a sense of empowerment. If you get employee engagement right, it will feed into your customer experience. When people are motivated and they know what’s expected, they'll feel empowered and will want to deliver a great level of service. And the customer experience will be better because of it.
If the business is growing quickly, and you need to recruit staff, then think about what you want them to do – especially if they’re going to be customer facing. How are they going to represent your brand, your values and your core structures? If people aren’t recruited on this basis, then it’s going to be much harder to embed these behaviours later on.
#2 Have the training and support in place to help them succeed
At the end of training, both you and your new employee need to be comfortable that you’ve achieved what you need to achieve. It might be that in a group of new starters, this approach means different people will be ready to complete training at a different time. It’s about making sure that people meet the requirements that you’ve set, without being limited by time.
As well, it’s important to recognise where, as an organisation, you’re failing to help new employees Ask yourself, “What have we not done right?”
It may be the case that some people never make the grade. But sometimes people just need to be shown things in a different way - not everybody's the same. You have to give people a chance to prove themselves. That may take a bit of time, but if you get that person engaged, by supporting them through this early stage, then they can come out and succeed. They're going to be far more motivated and a far greater advocate, internally and externally, if you've shown them that you trust them and you believe in them.
#3 Share great customer feedback with your employees – congratulate them on a job well done
If you’re getting great feedback from a customer, share it with your employees. Positive recognition will help you to engage people, by affirming their hard work. If you have better engagement, you're going to get less staff turnover. If your staff turnover is lower, you won’t have to spend so much on recruitment.
Plus, you'll retain that experience within the organisation. It means it’s much easier for you to maintain your consistency. Lots of businesses grow quickly and lose people quickly. In the short-term, this isn’t necessarily a problem, but you’ll find that, over time, you've got no level of experience, you've got no backbone or depth in your employees.
