Ensuring customer satisfaction can depend on ensuring employee satisfaction. That is why your Concierge Customer Service journey should also include internal employee surveys. One of the key reasons for conducting an online survey, rather than speaking directly to someone, is to avoid “social desirability response,” (when individuals alter their survey responses when in the presence of an interviewer) to increase the accuracy of the feedback.
Here are some of the key items to include in internal employee surveys:
1. Employees’ perception of customers’ overall satisfaction and satisfaction with customer service: We often find a gap between employees’ perceptions of customers’ satisfaction and their actual satisfaction. In some cases, they overestimate customer satisfaction and in others, they estimate it to be too low. If they overestimate customer satisfaction, it becomes extremely important to show employees both the opportunity for improvement and the need for the employees to review quantitative measures of satisfaction routinely (this is one reason that data dashboards can prove extremely useful). If they underestimate customer satisfaction, this provides a golden opportunity in which to bolster morale by demonstrating the team is creating even greater customer satisfaction than they realized.
2. Valued job characteristics: Remember that the best way to measure employee satisfaction is by tapping the extent to which employees perceive that the job characteristics they value are present in their jobs. So tap the extent to which they desire pay, growth opportunities, coworker relationships, work resources, and the like.
3. Satisfaction with valued characteristics: Using the same set of attributes, measure how satisfied employees are with the extent to which those characteristics are present in their jobs.
4. Overall job satisfaction: In addition to measuring the extent to which valued job characteristics are present, we also suggest that you include an overall job satisfaction measure. Rather than asking how satisfied employees are with their jobs, overall, we recommend that you ask how likely they would be to recommend a job at your company to a friend or relative.
5. Work stress: Understanding the degree to which employees perceive stress in their work, and how that perception varies across individuals and departments, provides important information. One of the best single indicators of work stress is, “How much of the time do you feel you have too much to do in the time available?” Notably, we often find high levels of work stress among salespeople, likely because of the diverse scope of their roles and tasks.
6. Perception of website, eCommerce, and related areas: Even among distributors with exceptionally high levels of satisfaction, we often find lower levels of satisfaction with the website, eCommerce, and related areas. For that reason, we suggest that you ask specifically about employees’ perceptions of these tools.
Want to learn more?
This blog post is based off material from my book with Randy MacLean:
“YOU CAN’T SERVE THEM WELL IF YOU DON’T KNOW THEM WELL: Capturing and Captivating Customers with Concierge Customer Service™”
You can get the first two chapters for FREE here.
If you’d like a full copy of the entire book, you can get it here.
Dr. Jeanne Hurlbert, President of Hurlbert Consulting is an expert in sociology and survey research. After spending more than 25 years in academia, she now uses her extensive behavioral science expertise to help companies like yours distinguish yourselves through customer service. What sets her approach to customer service apart is that she begins by helping companies meld research and marketing to find out:
(a) exactly what their customers want and
(b) exactly how well they’re succeeding in giving customers what they want.
You can schedule a consult with her by going to www.ConciergeCustomerService.com; you can call her at 888-590-9677; or send an email here. And, if you’d like to complete her complimentary assessment to see how well you’re doing in knowing and serving your customers well, just go to www.FixYourService.com.
