Businesses are racing to implement new practices and policies in an effort to rebound and reach a level of organizational normalcy for their employees and customers. But getting back to business in a way that promotes customer loyalty requires leadership to be open to rethink strategies, and look for innovative ways to adapt to new market conditions without losing the attributes that earned consumers trust in the first place. It’s evident that the most important factor for brand loyalty is shifting increasingly to the customer experience. In fact, a recent PwC survey found that 73% of all people point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchase decisions. However only 49% say companies provide a good customer experience today. The point is clear, the customer experience matters, and most companies are missing opportunities to improve it.
In a time when meeting heightened customer expectations is the status quo to survive, companies that want to truly operate at the pace of innovation need to carve out a competitive advantage. To meet the needs of the customer of the future, companies need to fully utilize every available resource they have.
Frontline workers are the link to client satisfaction
For industries where brick-and-mortar locations play a big role in the customer experience, such as hospitality, food service, and retail, this means harnessing insights from the employees that make the first contact with customers and guide their entire experience forward — frontline workers.
After all, customers primarily interact with frontline workers, not business leaders. And lately, unforeseen changes to many businesses have compounded the importance of those interactions as frontline workers have needed to expand their roles in a number of ways. Some employees are leading the charge in educating customers on how to safely navigate the in-location experience. Others are figuring out how to do more with less to cover for a reduction in skills or capacity due to widespread layoffs and furloughs.
Ensuring customer safety and satisfaction and learning new skills on the job all while adjusting to and upholding new operating procedures requires a keen ability to adapt and identify areas for improvement. This new working environment is giving frontline workers an accelerated level of experience — solving for problems that impact the customer first-hand — that more senior employees and leadership simply don’t have. It’s the insights from these new experiences that will spark innovation and progress for companies of the future to meet the needs of the customer of the future.
Sourcing the right tool for your business
For a shot at success, businesses need the ability to gather insights directly from those interacting with customers and seeing the business impact of new policies and procedures in real-time. In other words, they need tools in place to help them listen. But how do you capture these insights? Better two-way communication with frontline workers is key, and businesses will need to support the front line with the best communication tools to ensure brilliant ideas from their experiences are not lost.
The problem with traditional employee communication tools is that they historically fail to promote engagement because they aren’t designed to function in an agile way that compliments the working environment and needs of the employees using them. When tools struggle to be adopted, the speed of information slows to a crawl and with it, a company’s ability to proactively strategize and communicate changes to meet customer demands.
Not only do businesses need to collect information from employees, but they also need to relay new information to employees, with velocity, and at scale. Whether that be a new safety protocol that needs to be implemented across all locations or a product update that could affect shoppers in stores immediately. The power to deploy changes and updates with consistency, through a channel that employees actually engage with will give businesses the ability to optimize in ways their competitors can only dream of. Without a communication loop that connects frontline employees, managers, and business leaders, companies won’t be able to make truly informed decisions based on the experiences happening in stores. And some of the best ideas and insights from amazing employees will never see the light of day.
The right communication platform to learn from frontline workers’ interactions with customers has the ability to share knowledge, and source employee feedback to gather real-time insights. If employees don’t have the ability to grow and learn in a just-in-time way, they are less equipped to adapt quickly to meet customer needs.
Top-down strategies are ineffective for real-time insights
The fastest way to optimize the customer experience is to begin with supporting frontline workers and let the interactions inform and work their way up to leadership. Strategies led top-down by leadership can’t be informed by real-time customer insights, and can’t hope to keep up with customer needs in an effective way. If frontline employees can’t facilitate conversation and collaborate to drive business outcomes, the most valuable resource a company has for innovation becomes siloed and disengaged. But providing frontline workers the ability to facilitate conversation and collaborate with a communication platform they love to use will be the difference-maker between those that fail and those that make a successful rebound, or even flourish in the years to come.
Jordan Ekers
Latest posts by Jordan Ekers (see all)
- Why Frontline Communications Are Key To A Rebound - November 7, 2020
