It goes without saying that customers are at the heart of organisational success. A positive customer experience translates into strong customer advocacy, better return on investment (ROI), and recurring revenue.
Successful organisations have found a key element to delivering great customer experience — excellent employee experience. Many customer-centric companies vouch for a strong correlation between happy employees and satisfied customers.
Take M1 as an example. This Singapore’s telco empowers its employees to work more efficiently with new tools and applications. With Salesforce technology, training time is 50% faster for new sales and service employees. It eliminates repetitive and mundane tasks, making it easier for them to serve customers better. In the long run, efficiency and productivity gains in operations lead to cost optimisation.
The Salesforce State of Connected Customer report reveals that 85% of respondents cited the treatment of employees as an influencing factor in their decision to buy from a company.
Why does a happy employee equal a happy customer?
In his book ‘Customer what?’, customer experiences (CX) specialist and author Ian Golding talks about how empathy is the biggest factor in creating a positive customer experience. However, empathy should not be limited to the customer and must also be directed at your staff. If you don’t get it right for your team, they won’t direct it toward your customers.
Customer experiences frequently mirror how employees feel about their work; thus, happy and supported staff are more likely to facilitate excellent customer experiences. Employees who are happy and engaged at work are more likely to have a positive outlook, be more attentive, use innovation and creativity in their interactions with customers, and represent your business to them in the most favourable manner.
So, how can you ensure a great employee experience?
Build your Digital HQ on Slack to help teams break down internal silos, foster cross-functional working relationships, and provide the right people with the right information at the right time.
1. Remove barriers in communication
Frequent and effective communication is one of the first steps to an enhanced employee experience, whether in a physical, remote, or hybrid setting.
In a research conducted by Salesforce, connected tools and communication methods improve return on investment (ROI) greatly. Marketing teams on Slack experience 16% faster campaign execution and carry out 8% more campaigns per year. Sales teams using Slack saw an average 13% increase in deals closed and reduced onboarding costs by 39%. Service teams experience an 11% average increase in customer satisfaction and a 9.2% average increase in a company’s net promoter score with Slack. Overall, there is an increase in employee productivity by 26%* using Slack. In return, companies saw an increase in ROI from improved customer satisfaction and reduced cost of customer service tickets.
How can your teams leverage the power of real-time communication with Slack?
Slack allows your employees to discuss specific projects and issues in one-on-one conversations or within small groups. Urgent request? No problem, just tag the person to get their attention instantaneously.
You can also create separate channels for different topics, teams, or groups – to which access for employees can be extended or restricted as needed. Invite people from outside the company to these channels.
For brief meetings, Slack provides huddles, either within a channel, between coworkers, or for the entire team. And if you need to provide context — exchange files, documents, images, and videos from your device or directly from the cloud within a message.
No time to send a written note? Start a video or voice chat within Slack. In fact, Slack supports all the widely used video conferencing services.
2. Make it easier to find information
Searching for a particular message from hundreds of email threads and private conversations requires a lot of time and effort. In Slack, you can simply pin messages to designate which ones you wish to find later. Or use the search function to find specific chats or messages, or even to analyse archived conversations. There is a wide variety of modifiers available in Slack that you may use to focus your search and locate the particular note you’re looking for. This allows your teams to spend their time more productively on value-added tasks.
3. Enable seamless collaboration across teams and time zones
Need to speak with someone, but they’re out of the office or in a meeting? Schedule the message to be delivered when they come back online. While sending a message, Slack will suggest times and let you know what time it will be in the recipient’s time zone. Or you can also set a custom time for message delivery if you know when the recipient will be back at their seat. This ensures important messages are not misplaced, while ensuring that they don’t interfere with an employee’s me-time or focus hours — a foolproof way to nudge those employee experience scores higher.
4. Let go of the surveys for a bit!
It is quite possible that the employees do not open or fill in the feedback surveys designed to boost employee engagement rates. The reasons could be many — lack of time, lack of interest, or complicated process. But in the process, you are losing out on valuable information such as which workers feel appreciated and engaged, who needs training programmes, what are the possibilities for skill development and so on.
Make Slackbot your friend. Get the friendly assistant to ask your employees some relevant questions on a weekly basis. These could include something along the lines of “Are you satisfied with the recognition you get for your work?”, “Are you happy with how frequently your direct manager provides feedback?”, “Do you recognise how your efforts support the objectives of my organisation?”, etc.
Employees can complete this in just a few minutes, encouraging regular feedback cycles across the organisation. Additionally, Slack also lets you run employee appreciation programmes to recognise and reward excellent work and high-performing individuals.
5. And finally, leverage technology to take the struggle out of work
Leveraging technical solutions is almost always good for increasing the employee experience. You can simply automate routine, repetitive processes inside and outside Slack simply by using clicks rather than extensive coding. Plus, your team can access almost any app from where they work, thanks to the more than 2,400 apps listed in the Slack App Directory.
Technology + engaged employees = Satisfied customers
Employees can make or break your success story no matter how great your customer-facing app is or how resilient your supply chain is. Engaged, motivated employees go the extra mile to serve the business, providing better customer service and keeping customers satisfied. Thus, it is important that employers put in place the right processes and tools that empower employees to do this.
With Salesforce and Slack, you can take multiple steps to enhance employee experience. Choose from the countless ways to tailor Slack to your remote team’s needs, and establish a strong remote work culture that keeps employees engaged, and empowers them to provide great customer experiences.
Learn more about how Salesforce + Slack can help you empower your teams and build your Digital HQ.
Source: 2022 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights study.
Data is from a survey of 3,706 Salesforce customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of Salesforce. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics. This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of the Salesforce blog.
