An employee will never treat a customer better than you treat the employee. Organizations constantly focus on improving the customer experience. But, unfortunately, they neglect employee experience in the process. The pandemic has changed how employees view their job. It has caused their priorities to change. As a result, companies are faced with The Great Resignation and are struggling to fill their vacancies. Customer experience is suffering, which causes sales and revenue to suffer. So managing your employee experience is critical to improving the experience of the customer. This blog post will discuss how Workforce Management bridges the gap between customer and employee experience. Partner with Workforce Management to enable your CX and EX improvement initiatives.
Here are nine ways Workforce Management enables successful employee experience initiatives that directly correlate to improving your customer experience.
Real-Time Feedback
Workforce Management teams monitor the flow and quality of work throughout the day. In some cases, employees have direct access to their performance data. And, employees love watching how they compare to the rest of the team.
Real-time feedback is a powerful tool provided by Workforce Management to improve the employee experience. It makes the employee’s job more exciting and even compelling. In addition, real-time feedback motivates employees to beat their best performance and helps them stay on task.
Real-time feedback keeps employees focused on the goal and how they measure against the goal. Workforce Management provides employees with measurable daily objectives and attainment, so they know what they need to do to exceed those objectives in real-time. When employees meet or exceed their daily objectives, the organization improves the customer experience.
Prevent Understaffing and Reduce Employee Stress
When you are understaffed, the employees have to fill the gap, which causes stress and burnout. When your employees are stressed, burned-out, and unable to have frequent downtime, it negatively affects the customer experience. Unfortunately, when customers aren’t receiving the level of service they expect, they respond by adding stress to the employee.
Workforce Management is the art and science of staffing the right people, at the right time, with the right skills and training. As a result, employees won’t become disgruntled by discouragement and low job satisfaction. Instead, workforce Management prevents understaffing by accurately forecasting the demand and comparing that to the certification and training history of the available employees.
Additionally, Workforce Management improves employee experience by considering employee time-off requests, attrition rates, attendance trends, etc., when building staffing plans. When Workforce Management executes this highly complex process correctly, the employee experience improves, and the overall customer experience follows.
Removes the Overtime Burden
Overtime negatively impacts employee experience, which causes poor customer experience. Overtime is stressful once the employee crosses their natural peak performance. When that happens, they get short with the customers, lose their compassion and empathy when solving the customer’s issue, or worse, become rude.
Workforce Management optimizes staffing levels based on expected demand to prevent the need to run overtime. In addition, they forecast attrition rates and work with recruiting and training to ensure new staff is hired, trained, and ready to work before there is a vacancy. As a result, the team continues working at an optimal rate. Therefore, the organization improves the customer experience because the employees can work within their peak performance.
Workforce Management Standardizes Key Processes
Without standardization of key processes and procedures creates a negative employee experience. In addition, without equally applied consistent policies and processes, organizations open the door for managers to play favorites. As a result, there is a negative impact on the employee experience.
Standardized processes create a mutually beneficial culture of fairness and understanding. When employees know what to do, how to do it, and what good looks like, they don’t hesitate to do it. Additionally, there isn’t stress related to knowing the right way. If an employee makes a mistake, they know the process for addressing it is consistent. They feel safe in their work environment. The absence of fear improves the employee experience, which increases the customer experience.
Workforce Management Empowers Employees
When employees feel empowered and in control over their day, their experience improves. As a result, they improve the customer experience. Workforce Management enables employee self-service. Self-service takes the responsibility from HR or their manager and puts it into the hands of the employee. Giving employees a way to manage tasks that directly impact their paycheck helps them control their workday.
With Workforce Management, employees have easy access to their time cards and schedules. If they want time off or greater flexibility, they don’t have to deal with the stress of going to their boss. Instead, they go to Workforce Management. They can bid on shifts, swap shifts, and request changes without relying on their manager’s opinion. Empowering employees provides a psychological boost that improves performance, job satisfaction, and experience. In turn, they deliver a better customer experience.
Centralized Management Creates Objectivity
Without Workforce Management, employees seek out their manager to make requests. Unfortunately, organizations inadvertently hire bad managers. Sometimes managers make decisions based on how they feel about an employee. It creates distrust in leadership and negative employee perceptions. As a result, they treat customers poorly and create a negative experience.
Workforce Management creates a centralized place where staffing decisions are objective. It removes the personality from the equation because Workforce Management knows the data behind the employee rather than the employee. As a result, employees have a greater sense of fairness and consistency in how time off requests, shift swaps and shift flexibility get made.
Improves Employee Work-Life Balance
Workforce Management creates greater work-life balance by accomodating schedule preferences, which improves employee experience. For example, when shifts open up, employees who want extra hours can bid on them. It removes the need for employees to beg their manager for time off, different shifts, or extra hours. As a result, employees become more loyal, increasing their confidence that there is fairness in determining their hours. Therefore, they treat the customer better and improve the customer experience.
Workforce Management Inspects and Validates Good Behavior
Managers are people and are fallible. For example, have you ever witnessed a manager praise an employee who is often late or takes extra-long meals or breaks? Unfortunately, managers don’t always recognize when their star performers are duds, especially when the department or team is large.
Workforce Management validates which employees are responsible. They track and monitor schedule adherence, start, meal, and break times. In addition, Workforce Management reports on attendance and performance trends. As a result, managers can better reward the right employees. When managers recognize employees for good behavior, they are happier with their jobs. So they exceed customer expectations, improving the customer experience.
Workforce Management Integrates and Unlocks Insights
Workforce Management teams maintain, analyze, and leverage powerful data insights that encompass the entire employee lifecycle. Additionally, the data Workforce Management reviews go way beyond hours clocked and attendance.
Partner with Workforce Management from the start of your customer and employee experience initiatives to unlock a treasure trove of data regarding employees and their customer interactions. Use Workforce Management datafication processes to improve employee experiences so they can deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Workforce Management improves employee experience by increasing job satisfaction, minimizing the perceptions of unfair or inconsistent processes, and empowering employees. In addition, workforce Management processes and data allow you to deliver consistent, repeatable, and predictable results. These things help employees feel confident in their work which gives customers a good experience.
An employee will never treat a customer better than you treat them. You can’t have a successful customer experience improvement initiative without considering the employee experience. Workforce Management can bridge the gap between these two interconnected strategies.
