How to Motivate Staff by Checking In on Them and Giving Them a Quantifiable Way to Measure Customer Satisfaction

Motivational initiatives should be genuine, rather than a forced action because employees can see a mile off if they are trying to be manipulated. Making an announcement about redundancies and then scheduling a fun event just afterwards to celebrate employee achievements is not going to go down well.

Here are some top tips for motivating staff in ways that are effective and will drive the results you want to achieve.

Make activities a regular part of the calendar

Activities linked to boosting engagement should take place all year round and not just before a colleague satisfaction survey, for example. A lot of businesses make the mistake of neglecting their engagement activities until they realise there is a problem with motivation, which is too late. Scheduling monthly activities will help to ensure there is all year-round consistency, so it does not feel ingenuine when it suddenly appears out of nowhere.

Provide regular feedback

Employees usually thrive from getting positive feedback and encouragement that they are doing good work. Even something as small as saying thank you can be very powerful, especially when it is specific to a particular task that they have been working on.

Regular communication, through a range of different ways such as 1:1 meetings, informal chats or sending written feedback via email or any collaboration tools you use, should be utilised to provide regular feedback to motivate staff. Again, being specific about the task that has been performed to a good standard, will be more effective in motivating repeat good performance than a generic well done.

Offer training and development opportunities

Employees are more motivated in their roles if they know that they are progressing in their career and developing their skills and experience. As well as giving employees the satisfaction that they are working towards something that will benefit their career, relevant training will boost their skills and help them to perform their job better.

Anything from providing time for them to complete a free online training course, to paying for online degree course fees, can help to boost skills and motivation. If your company has a large learning and development budget, investing in training is the ideal way to boost staff motivation levels. Employees who feel that their employer is willing to invest in them, will often be the ones that remain loyal to the company and are less likely to apply for roles outside of the company.

There are lots of development opportunities that do not require financial investment. For instance, you could set up a mentoring scheme, where more senior employees mentor less experienced ones, providing their insights and helping to pass on their knowledge.

Another idea is to delegate projects to employees involving work that is outside the remit of their role but enables them to expand on their existing skills and experience. The best way to motivate staff through development opportunities is to understand what their long-term career goals are and to build opportunities based around those goals.

Of course, the goals should be beneficial to the company, so if employees are asking for development opportunities that will not benefit the business, they maynot be worth investing in.

There are lots of great resources for free online training at the moment, so making the most of any that are relevant to your business is a great way to provide development opportunities without a learning and development budget.

Set realistic and time-specific objectives

Working towards objectives, especially if they are incentivised through salary increments or bonuses, is one of the most effective ways of motivating employees to perform to their highest level. Setting goals that are aligned to the business strategy, and are linked to the desired business outcomes, will make sure that they are working towards a goal that will have a wider performance impact.

Introduce reward schemes

As well as considering performance related pay and bonuses, reward schemes are another very effective way to get staff motivated and working to their full potential. Reward schemes can vary greatly depending on your budget, from presenting vouchers to the employee of the month, to a small gift such as a bottle of wine, box of chocolates or similar.

It is important that any reward scheme focuses on what the employee has done to receive their reward. There is a danger that teams can present different members of the team with a reward almost on a rota basis, without any real rationale behind presenting the reward. This approach reduces the level of motivation to receive the reward, if employees feel it is not linked to effort and work delivered.

Sharing information that explains why the person has been rewarded, will motivate other employees to try and replicate that level of effort to get their own reward. This can be done by sharing news on communication platforms, an intranet site or even sending a department email out that explains the rationale behind the reward.

Reward winners can be selected by managers, or they can be voted for by their peers, which can sometimes be found to be more motivational than being acknowledged by managers for the work they have done.

Providing ways to measure customer satisfaction

If your business involves customer service, either face to face in a store, or over the phone in a contact centre, for example, measuring customer satisfaction is important to the success of your business. If customer satisfaction levels are low, this usually results in a negative financial impact, as customers will stop using your business and may even tell their friends and family about a bad experience they had with you.

For businesses with large numbers of customer facing employees, providing a quantifiable way of measuring customer satisfaction can be beneficial in two ways. On one hand, it allows the business to successfully monitor satisfaction levels so that any changes and solutions can be implemented.

The second benefit is that the data can be used to motivate customer facing employees. Their objectives can include customer satisfaction metrics, so that the business is benefitting across both areas. They can boost motivation by setting measurable targets so employees strive to deliver the highest quality of customer service. At the same time, customer satisfaction levels are improving as you respond to customer feedback.

Methods for measuring customer satisfaction

There are many different methods for measuring customer satisfaction and choosing the best ones will depend on the type of business and their key objectives. In customer contact centres, CSAT is a very popular method of gathering customer satisfaction data.

Read more about CSAT & other methods of measuring customer satisfaction.

There is also NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), or simply looking at online customer reviews. In order to tie customer satisfaction metrics into motivating employees, the method must be clear to calculate and easy to understand how improvements can be made to increase the scores.

CSAT is often built into KPIs for customer service teams, as this is a method that shows how the employee has individually contributed and how they have performed in relation to a set of consistent measures.

The beauty of CSAT is that the scoring system is clear and straightforward and is applied across the whole team or department. Having friendly competitions involving who scores the highest on a specific question, can help to motivate team members to put more effort into boosting their scores.

If you have a business premises that customers visit, such as a store, restaurant, or transport station, having a visible way to capture customer satisfaction will be a more effective way to capture feedback.

Ombea provides a range of tools and solutions that capture customer experience metrics, including QR codes that can be scanned to direct customers to a website that captures feedback. This information is then instantly available to managers, but employees could be provided with the data too, to enable them to identify aspects of their customer service that could be improved upon.

With real-time information available, employees will quickly be able to see the results of any changes that they make, a great motivator, as they can immediately see what works well and what does not work so well.

Conclusion

Understanding the best ways to motivate staff and implementing the most relevant initiatives will help businesses to improve customer satisfaction rates. Investing in this will deliver a huge range of benefits, not just boosting employee engagement and improving customer satisfaction.

The business will also stand to benefit from improved employee retention, which can save thousands of pounds in recruitment costs. Retaining high performing staff is a key priority for successful businesses, so investing in learning opportunities and spending more time working on professional development will give a good return on any investment.

If you are looking for ways to increase the motivation of your staff by providing quantifiable methods for measuring customer satisfaction, the experts at Ombea will be happy to discuss your options and recommend the best solution for your business in line with your company objectives. We have a huge range of solutions including touchless feedback terminals, or QR codes linking to customised survey questions.

Visit our website to find out more about our range of powerful customer experience solutions.