Deliver a great customer experience by investing in an employee engagement app. Yes – you read that right. This is the age of the experience economy, and consumers want convenience as well as connection. Provide fast service with technology, but don’t forget to keep it human with an engaged, responsive workforce.
As companies incorporate more technology, 75% of global consumers want to engage with an actual person, but 59% feel that businesses don’t offer that human side of the experience anymore.
Motivate Your Employees to Deliver Better Customer Service
To be competitive, companies need to humanize the customer experience again. That means investing in an employee engagement app that can support your frontline employees in delivering that personal, end-to-end journey customers want. If you don’t, they’re bound to go elsewhere.
Even in this day when people order meals over an app and book hotels online, people still want service with a smile, meaning they want to engage with other people.
In fact, 84% of people in one survey say that personalized service is a deciding factor in the products and services they purchase.
Here are three ways an employee engagement app humanizes the customer experience.
Reverse Low Engagement Trends in Frontline Employees
Frontline workers are most often the client-facing team of an organization in many businesses like restaurants, hospitals, and retail. With a low engagement rate, frontline employees are the most disengaged workforce population due to their dispersed locations, high mobility, and lack of connection to the company, not the qualities needed to deliver successful customer service.
An employee engagement mobile app, like Beekeeper’s digital workplace platform, is designed to build engagement in the frontline workforce in several ways.
- The simple act of including employees into the mainstream communication of a company is an engagement game-changer.
- Inline translations let employees connect in the language they choose.
Messages sent with Beekeeper’s inline translation feature reach every employee in their preferred language.
- Facilitating two-way communication encourages active participation.
- Empowering non-desk workers with a way to receive information they need for higher performance and better customer service.
- Creating a community at work for a usually dispersed workforce.
- Collecting actionable data. Beekeeper’s employee engagement app has an analytics dashboard for management to track engagement and implement strategies to deepen that engagement even further.
How an App Helped Heathrow Airport Engaged Their Team and Deliver Real-Time Customer Service
With 78 million passengers stopping through every year, you could say that customer service is a priority for Heathrow Airport. But communicating with and aligning 6,500 employees and finding the right tool to empower them to deliver personal service to tens of millions of people was no easy task. Workers were dispersed over a huge facility with little contact and low engagement to the bigger operation.
With Beekeeper, on-the-ground frontline workers get a daily briefing and are encouraged to communicate any ideas they have for improving the facility for their customers (which officials follow through on.)
From security emergencies to terminal information, there is a wealth of immediate information employees need to be helpful to guests. Beekeeper’s real-time messaging enables fast response for any situation. Employees are now more engaged with one another, management, and their customers.
Create an Internal Marketing Strategy
Companies spend time and money on external marketing strategies, like ad campaigns and social media, that connect with their customer base. Those same marketing strategies need to be applied to internal marketing as well.
Think about where you shop and why. There are decisions we make as consumers based on a familiar, friendly face at the market even if we’re spending more for a pound of cheese. And we’re not alone.
42% of consumers would pay more simply for a good experience with a company and its employees.
In order to deliver that personalized experience, employees also need to be connected to the brand, but only 10% feel they are. That means 90% of employees are brand ambassadors that lack a passion for their product, which inevitably comes across to the customer.
Employee engagement apps are the perfect tool to deliver internal marketing content to your team. Empower them to bring their A-game to work and be champions of the brand through targeted, transparent messaging.
An internal marketing strategy should accomplish two things:
- Align vision. To be authentic in their work, employees need to understand and buy into the company’s vision, the purpose of the mission, and their important role in moving the organization towards its goals.
- Align messaging. Content should be consistent in external marketing as well as internal. In other words, communicate the same messages to customers and employees alike. Stories you share with customers over digital channels, like social media pages, should be shared over the employee engagement app, too.
Watch how RHW Management unifies brand messaging for every hotel in their portfolio.
Make Employees Happy and Your Customers Will Be Too
It’s impossible to listen to Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” without feeling, well, happy. While your employees might not be toe-tapping their way through their shift, they need to feel happy about their work and about where they work.
With an employee engagement app, a company can boost job satisfaction dramatically. Use the app for things that employees want, like:
- Recognition. Congratulate employees who do a great job.
- Autonomy. Delegate work to show you trust your employees.
- Listen. Employees are happier at work when they are encouraged to contribute.
- Leadership development. Use employee engagement apps to offer training for professional growth and opportunities for advancement.
Employees with higher job satisfaction stay with the company longer. Why is this relevant to the customer experience? Customers come back to a business when they’ve established relationships with employees because emotional connections drive repeat business.
Walk past any old-fashioned barber shop and it looks like time has stopped. Customers smiling and sharing stories while they get their hair cut. Despite all of the technology that streamlines and simplifies B2C interactions, people still want that good old human interaction as part of their customer experience on top of the modern conveniences that technology offers.
Humanize the customer experience with an employee engagement app.
Download our case study to learn how we helped Heathrow Airport humanize their customer experience.
