Tag Archive for: customer experience

High Employee Turnover: Impacts, Reasons, and Solutions

Many companies, particularly in the retail industry, face a high turnover of staff. In any industry, high employee turnover is a problem, even more so in industries where the majority of employees are on the frontline and deal with customers directly.

High employee turnover comes with a host of issues, reasons, and several solutions. We’ve boiled it down to the basics:

The 2 Big Issues

1. No Consistency for the Customer

Customer service has many facets. One of the elements that help improve customer satisfaction is consistency: people enjoy familiarity. A customer who walks into his or her favourite shoe shop and is greeted by a familiar face – that of a long-time employee – who remembers their preferences and needs is a loyal customer.

In the retail industry, this is tricky; many employees view retail as an entry job – one that will springboard them through some work experience into a ‘real job’. Gone are the days when walking into a small community fashion shop would earn you a personal greeting and a ‘…how did that dress work for your son’s graduation?’. Customers crave that type of personalised interaction – it makes them feel valued – but it is incredibly difficult to give them when high employee turnover is in play; it’s not exactly possible to train new employees in individual customer profiles.

2. Continuous, Inefficient, and often Expensive Training Requirements

With high employee turnover, companies face the issue of having to train newcomers constantly and consistently. As a result, training models are often designed and used without adapting them to changing situations. Why waste time building new models when this batch of employees is just going to leave anyway? In a sense, many businesses give up because they can’t keep up: it becomes more time-efficient to just let new employees use the current, un-personalised training system.

This is where new employees face ancient PowerPoint presentations with outdated information. They see that the company hasn’t invested any time or energy into these training packets and switch off – why should they engage with this material if the company hasn’t? And so the cycle continues.

The 2 Big Reasons behind High Employee Turnover

1. No Engagement and Motivation

We touched on this a little already: if an employee doesn’t feel engaged with a business for whatever reason, they’re going to get bored. Employee loyalty, like customer loyalty, isn’t something that just happens: it has to be earned over time. This means that businesses have to put in the effort to engage and motivate their staff.

2. No Support or Management

One of the biggest reasons why high employee turnover occurs is due to management issues. Management, as most of us know, is an artform. A good manager is worth their weight in gold; a bad one much less so. Bad management, or no management, will send employees packing without a backwards glance. Employees want – and need! – to feel like they are being supported; they don’t want to feel undervalued or overworked. It is a manager’s job to dispense advice, constructive criticisms, and compliments in such a way that is most helpful to the employee.

The Solution

There are several ways in which a business can tackle high employee turnover. What it really boils down to is communication.

Understanding employee expectations, requirements, and issues before they come into play is vital to taking control of any employee relationship. This line of communication goes both ways, of course, allowing for a company to relay its expectations, rules, and goals to its employees so that no one operates blindly.

Several months ago, we discussed the importance of an evolving HR policy. A good HR policy will accurately reflect the needs of both the business and the employee – allowing for a dialogue between the two. This is the main, vital thing to help kerb high employee turnover.

The Inevitable

Sometimes, however, it isn’t possible to manage high employee turnover; sometimes, it’s just a fact of life. It is impossible to control everything. A company can go out of its way to increase employee engagement and motivation, and this will certainly help with the issue, but it might not be possible to stop high turnover completely. This can be due to the nature of the work – perhaps it is a high-stress job that people simply can’t handle for too long; or maybe it’s an easy entry-level job that young adults use to break into the workforce.

It’s not always possible to fix high employee turnover, but even in those cases where it remains an issue, it is possible to work with it rather than despite it.

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4 Ways Mystery Shopping can help Increase Company Productivity

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Every business owner wants to increase company productivity. That’s the nature of business, generally speaking: essentially, it’s about sales. Those sales, however, are inextricably tied to the people who make them possible, a company’s employees and its valued customers. Without customers, a business would not exist, and without engaged employees, customers would walk away for lack of a great service experience. As they should.

Mystery shopping is a market research tool through which we can gain valuable insight into a business’ performance. If you’d like to know how mystery shopping actually works, check out this article. The question we’d like to address today is why companies should even bother with it; how does mystery shopping benefit your business? Can it really increase company productivity? How?

Firstly, yes, mystery shopping can increase company productivity, here are just four ways how:

1. Mystery shopping examines frontline employee performance

When a mystery shopper is sent in, one of the things they usually gain insight into is how well the staff on the floor of a business treat them. In other words, how well your company delivers its customer service. This is a great way to tell whether your team members are providing the right types of experiences to your customers. Armed with this knowledge, problem areas can swiftly be addressed to increase company productivity!

2. Is your brand resonating with your customers?

Another thing important to increase company productivity is determining how well your brand messages are resonating with your customers. Are they even aware of what you’re offering? Lack of or failing brand resonance is one of the leading causes of a drop in sales. Properly conducted mystery shopping research can reveal whether or not your brand has lost touch with its message and its customers.

3. Do all your outlets follow the correct product and marketing placement policies?

If you have multiple outlets, it’s important to make sure that all of your shopfronts are following your placement policies. Following on from brand resonance, this is an important way to make sure that your customers are not only comfortable in your store – i.e. they know where to find things, or check for updates! – but also actually see your onsite marketing material. No doubt you put a lot of effort into making sure your customers see what you’d like them to, it would be a shame if those efforts to increase company productivity and sales go down because one of your outlets didn’t get the memo.

Also read this article: Retail Customer Service: Reality of Retail Industry

4. Are your training & incentives programs helping to increase company productivity?

Training and incentivizing our employees is one of the best ways to ensure that they are meeting our company standards. This is by no means a bad thing, but it’s always a good idea to measure the impact of such programs and see whether they are meeting your expectations. At AQ, we’ve successfully used to take the pulse of such programs, particularly in the automotive industry.

And there you have it, a quick selection of 4 ways mystery shopping can help increase company productivity.

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4 Emotions Driving Customer Loyalty

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Companies are learning that good customer loyalty is a vital part of their business. It’s no longer enough to rely on new prospects; companies are recognising the importance of repeat business and customer advocacy.

What is Customer Loyalty?

Customer loyalty is an attitude and behaviour where customers favour one business brand over others. Usually, a company earns customer loyalty through satisfying the customer’s needs and requirements, whether it’s a service or product (or both!). It can also be born out of a sense of familiarity with a brand’s image, and, more and more, a company’s corporate social responsibility.

Also read this article for more information: How To Improve Customer Experience

Why is it so important?

The Gartner Group discovered that 20% of existing customers generate 80% of a company’s profits. This is backed up by marketing data, which reveals that selling to brand new customers if only 5-20% likely, versus a whopping 60-70% for current customers.

That is customer loyalty at work.

A customer who has previously been satisfied by the quality of a product or impressed with the level of customer service, is more comfortable with the brand in question and as a result is far more likely to purchase again. And recommend that brand to others, enter customer advocacy.

What drives Customer Loyalty?

People tend to be driven by emotions. Customer loyalty comes from the emotional response to a successful business transaction. Are they happy with a product? Happy enough to come back and buy again? That ‘happiness’ is the driving factor, and must be maintained over time to stop the relationship from deteriorating.

There are many emotions and states of mind that play a part in this. On the whole, however, the following four take the lead:

Gratitude 1. Appreciation & Gratitude

These two emotions go hand-in-hand. A grateful customer is a loyal customer. They feel appreciated by the business because they’ve been looked after. In turn, they appreciate the business for performing up to their expectations, a great way to win customer loyalty!

Winner2. Comfortable

While not strictly speaking an ‘emotion’, this has to do with how comfortable customers are with a brand’s image. It’s about familiarity. People are more likely to use a brand they recognise and know to be ‘safe’ than step out of their comfort zone to try something different. This isn’t just about big business; today, with the Millennial consumer focussing on corporate social responsibility, smaller businesses with strong ties to the community, for example, have the power to outperform the large businesses in this area.

Surprise
3. Surprise!

Surprising a customer – in the right way – can ensure that a business stands out in a crowd. Being different is important to outdo the competition. More than that, however, surprise is one of the strongest emotions to tap into when it comes to maintaining customer loyalty as it will keep brand messages from going stale.

community4. Inclusion

People like to feel as though they belong and are part of a community. Being able to generate the feeling that customers are included in decisions, ideas, festivities, is a great way to increase customer loyalty, and a good way to stand out from the crowd. People are less likely to swap businesses if they feel like they are part of a family.

Of course, these aren’t the only emotions driving customer loyalty. People are too complex for us to assume that everyone reacts the same way or wants the same thing. Some of us just want to walk into a store and buy a pair of shoes, or a sundae, without being bothered that it’s not our ‘usual store’. But, let’s be honest, we do get a nice buzz when we walk into our favourite cafe and the barista goes “Hi, Sam, the usual?…One pumpkin-spiced double-frothed skinny latte, extra hot, extra large, with cinnamon dusting, to go, coming right up!”.

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Managing Customer Expectations to improve Customer Loyalty

Customer expectations? What’s the big fuss? A customer comes in, makes a purchase, goes away again, right? No big deal? We all know that it’s more than ‘no big deal’. A customer’s expectations are what we, as responsible companies, strive to meet.

What do you mean with ‘customer expectations’?

In a previous article, we discussed how customers want to be reassured that they’ve made the right choice. They want the product or service they bought from a company to meet their expectations. They don’t want to feel like they’ve lost time, been tricked, or – worse of all – wasted their money. A customer who leaves feeling used is never coming back, and they will spread the word. People are far more likely to share negative feedback than they are to share compliments.

Promising someone the stars and only coming back with a faintly glowing rock, is not the best way to get return customers. If you promise 100%, then you have to deliver 110%; that’s just the way customer service works. People want to feel special – they want their decision to use your company validated – and as a result, managing customer expectations is one of the key skill-sets required in the customer service game.

Another thing to remember is that not everyone has the same expectations. Or the same interpretation of what we, as companies, think are customer expectations.

Defining the Expectations Clearly

Last week, we talked about why knowing how to have a good conversation can empower the frontline team and drive the bottom line. It’s great to carry a good conversation; part of that is to have the same conversation. It’s not so great if the customer has a different understanding of the words that are coming from your frontline.

If a sales rep is talking about oranges and the customer is hearing apples, there’s going to be some issues!

Similarly, companies can be overzealous when it comes to promising quality. When was the last time we saw an infomercial at 3am that promised us smooth abs and great triceps in six weeks? Think back to the last advertisement you watched for a car, with the fine print warning that the clip was shot in optimal conditions and ‘real results may vary’. It’s difficult to manage customer expectations and boast the quality of your service or product.

Again, if we promise 100% then customer expectation is at least 100%. Any good customer service rep will do their best to make sure they’re giving 120%.

A Note about 100% Satisfaction

Everyone has different opinions, so how do we make sure we’re meeting customer expectations? Legally speaking, the promise of 100% satisfaction is all about the judgement of a ‘reasonable person’ [Source]. In this way, companies can protect themselves from irrational demands and unreasonable expectations.

How far do we go?

This is a good question. The answer varies depending on the practicality of the request. A customer coming into a green grocer to buy apples when there are none, is easier to please than a customer who walks into a car show demanding to buy t-shirts. Is there a practical way to meet their expectations? Then use common sense and strive to meet them! Unreasonable customer expectations? Do your best, but remember that there’s just no pleasing some people no matter how hard you try. Some people who will never be satisfied. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it our best shot though.

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