Oct 26, 2022

Can you have happy employees when you have unhappy customers?

The chances are, if some of your customers are unhappy, then some of your employees are going to be too, most likely the customer-facing ones – and no doubt senior management too!

However, some of the other employees in back-office roles could potentially be completely oblivious to the current customer sentiment, leaving you with quite a split of satisfaction levels internally, which can cause numerous problems, particularly to morale.

This is what happens when you’ve not made the customer experience an integral part of your business, operations, and internal communications strategies.

But does it really matter that not all employees are aware of the customer experience? Surely, it’s normal and to be expected that the customer-facing employees will experience more challenges due to the very nature of their roles?

Yes, absolutely. However, that doesn’t make it ok, and it certainly won’t be good for your business. Eventually, that negatively will seep into other areas of your business and create an even greater problem.

So, it’s a problem you want to tackle head on and as quickly as possible if you want to mitigate any further damage to your employee morale.

Where should you start? You can start by listening to your employees.

Proactively listening to the reasons that your employees are both happy and unhappy will provide you valuable insight into how you can improve both the employee and customer experiences at the same time.

The most likely reason for the disparity in the employee experience is that, somewhere along the customer experience, you have a process which is falling short or even failing. And this is creating a negative touchpoint in the customer journey.

It could be something as simple as the dilution of essential customer information from one department to another, or even via multiple departments. The customer could have told their first touchpoint that they need a specific delivery date, however that information has not been passed on, and so the delivery date that the customer requested, is not upheld. Leaving the customer unhappy and the customer-facing roles frustrated.

Clearly there is a flaw in the process which needs to be identified and remedied, quickly.

Listening to your employees will enable you to identify the flaw in the process and devise a solution to resolve it. It could be as simple as creating a shared file where all relevant departments draw their customer information from, or you invest in IT software which will collect and collate all customer data and share it to the entire business.

Whatever the solution, the remedy will come from listening to the experiences of your employees.

It seems so simple and yet so many businesses don’t utilise the experiences of their people when devising new strategies for business development and growth. Insight and innovation can come from any area of the business, and successful businesses are the ones who recognise that and value the opinions of their people.

So, which of your employees do you need to listen to in order to identify the improvements which could not only enhance your customer experience but also save your business money by reducing unnecessary internal errors?

Even just asking yourself that question and genuinely considering the answer means you’re off to a good start.

At Calm Blue, we are passionate about not only the customer experience, but the employee experience also, as they essentially go hand in hand. We can work with you to improve your processes and save your business money by reducing the cost of internal errors. It all starts with a conversation and some proactive listening.