Technological Empowerment Of Employees Strengthens Customer Experience

According to a recent study conducted by Gallup, there are around 2.7 billion frontline employees across the globe. However, only 13% of them feel empowered at work. Factually, top of the pyramid employees, including C-level executives and VP’s, are well known across the chain of employees and often command the highest pay. However, the most worthy employees are the frontline managers who directly deal with customers. 

Those frontline employees often sell the company’s products and services, respond to emails, answer customer service calls, greet and meet clients, providing academic writing services,make deliveries, and are your company’s representatives as a professional face. Also, all those desk-less workers who are mobile in the field, including electrical line servers, goods, and product manufacturers and assemblers; all are a part of a company’s employee hierarchy. 

Technological Empowerment of Employees And Customer Satisfaction

Every organization needs to motivate, engage, and empower frontline employees to deliver better customer satisfaction. Since they directly deal with your clients, with technological empowerment, they can take good care of your customers. 

According to a report published by PWC, more than 70% of customers regard customer care representatives as one of their purchase drives, while more than 60% emphasis customer service as more influential than advertisements.  

When it comes to technological empowerment, IT tools and technical access provides essential support to organizations for successful strategies. Since the majority of the global workforce is frontline employees, it is crucial to empower them technologically to get productive results and high revenues from the excellent customer experience. 

Below are four productive ways by which a company can empower and engage employees technologically to enhance the customer experience for better revenues. 

1. Develop Digital Communication Strategy

A digital communication strategy is not as technical and complicated as it sounds to be. Naturally, it means to embrace technology more than just emails to communicate with employees. 

Companies should consider a workforce communication platform to optimize digitalized internal and even external communication strategy. It facilitates the company to reach employees to their real-time location, especially for the remote, field, and desk-less onsite employees. Also, in a situation when they are likely to receive and respond to official messages. 

Most outdoor and field employees may not have a company device to communicate, and conventional emails are not proven to be as useful as workforce communication platforms and software installed in a company maintained communication device. 

Since most frontline employees are task-oriented, they may think about their strategies and behaviors that may align with the company’s policies. Hence, technological empowerment to leverage communication will be helpful to bridge the gap. 

Organizations may need to unify and align their employees with business goals, vision, and mission; hence, they have to define then to employees regularly. That is why; company’s IT departments may need to invest in the digitalization of communication strategies to reach all employees on their preferred channels. 

Ideally, a multi-channel approach is better to allow employees and communicators to engage and empowering with an interactive intranet, email digitalization, and mobile real-time reporting strategies. By this, communications can be targeted, précised, and segmentize to different persona. 

Additionally, special channels can be dedicated to specific departments. A two-way communication dialog can be infused in which employees can post customer’s queries, comments, and experiences which help interaction with relevant company person and managers can update, answer, and inform them timely. Lastly, employees can have file-sharing access with real-time notifications to breakdown the conventional barriers and challenges among employee and management communication. 

2. Invest In Onboarding Experience

Take time to discuss and create a thoughtful onboarding experience for your employees. Especially newly hired ones, as it will help to provide a positive environment for everyone. The necessity is critical for businesses as, according to Adam Robinson, 28% of employees quit within 90 days of joining. And the reasons he elaborated to get them on board are:

Onboarding enhances employee engagement: it is not just about giving workers the required technological tools they need to do a job. Onboarding is more to introduce employees to a company’s culture and make them align with goals, mission, and vision. As per the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), onboarding programs have more than 50% higher employee engagement rates, with more than 60% of the time to productivity ratios. 

Onboarding boosts retention: Deloitte found that around 90% of employees decide to work or not to work with an organization for the long term in the first six months of employment. Hence, if a company invests energy and time with new hires, they will feel welcomed, appreciated, and valued. 

Onboarding builds company-wise recruitments: organizations should not underestimate the power of employee referrals as an existing employee can be a loyal advocate or the worst nightmare to your potential future references. They are often an asset to get you top talent. Hence, it makes them feel good onboard. 

Hence, an onboarding program is an ideal way to empower employees to deal more efficiently with customers. Also, train them with real-life examples and call to customer strategies to make them an expert to deal with every query and problem by providing on the spot solutions to your clients. Create exclusive video, tips list, and documents to facilitate employees thrive, then introduce them to your work model and connected teams.  

3. Encourage Collaborative Working Environment

Millions of workers are doing their jobs despite place and time, and that suits well from frontline employees. They are operating in rotating shifts from multiple locations. Empowering them with technology can make them feel encouraged and lead them to deliver better customer satisfaction experience. 

Many tools can facilitate real-time collaboration among employees and customers to provide access to required and necessary information with updates that supports enhancing productivity and revenue. 

As elaborated by Michelle Richard, IT specialist for Premium Jackets; these technological empowerments may burden employees and cause distractions that may impose adverse effects on them. Not everyone is welcoming and ready for the new technology; hence, and it is essential to encourage a collaborative working environment to let them feel comfortable and aligned with the company’s strategy.   

The key to facilitating them is to empower them with practical tools without draining their time and energy, disengage them, or distract them from their actual tasks. 

4. Recognize Your Frontline Workers 

Proper recognition of employee’s contributions gets them a high level of satisfaction, which reduces turnover and enhances customer-generated revenue. Technological empowerment is a great tool to publicize their achievements, digital acknowledgment notes, thank you emails throughout the organization with flexibility of working hours. 

Hence, publish a success story along with some innovative ideas, run a creative idea campaign to make your employees own your organization’s brand, and translate it in delivering exceptional customer experiences with satisfaction. This will ultimately bring you the loyalty of both employees and clients. Good Luck!

Anout the Author: Melissa Calvert

Melissa Calvert is qualified in social science from University Of Leeds and an expert academic writer. She loves to read books and cook. She owns a website named accuratecite.com. She is working as a Social Science Expert at King Essay, exclusive dissertation writing services providers in the UK.

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