The Top 3 Considerations for Post-Covid Customer and Employee Service
We are all in the business of customer service. Whether serving internal or external customers, providing an exceptional experience is what sets individuals, teams and companies apart.
And it doesn’t happen by chance. The very best customer and employee service is the intentional manifestation of strategic business process, thoughtful operations, empowered team members, clear company values and the connected technology that supports it all.
Needless to say, all five were stretched and put to the test during the pandemic. The organizations that survived are now redefining their business operations in a world of new considerations. They are ramping up their workforces with newly hired employees to meet the demands of a re-emerging customer base. It is complex and challenging work.
Our clients are tackling questions like:
- How can I streamline my onboarding efforts?
- How can I maintain customer satisfaction while I train new team members?
- How do I embed customer service into our workplace culture from the start?
- How can I think about all of our efforts in a long term, scalable way?
While scaling up may seem like a good problem to have post-Covid, launching large scale training efforts for new employees while re-building a satisfied, loyal customer base is a stressful scenario for leadership and front-line team members alike.
At LeapPoint, we approach these questions from a people-first, Connected Work™ perspective. Connected Work is the essential backbone that brings people, processes and products together to ensure talent and technology align for the achievement of strategic goals and maximum gain.
As companies reimagine their businesses, we recommend considering these three key ideas:
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Support your employee training with technology that works for employees. Building a modern, flexible approach to onboarding and continuous training is a worthwhile investment when rebuilding a budget. Keep in mind that what you do now to create a scalable foundation will pay dividends compared to struggling to scale and overhaul down the road.
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Don’t choose between customer service and employee training. There are ways to maintain customer service standards while your newest team members focus on training. It all starts with parallel tracking your business process with your customer journey so that both goals are balanced and work together. By putting yourself in the shoes of your team members and your customers, you can strategically map how their journeys will align.
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Trust the Analytics. Across industries, we can count on customers having ever-changing expectations. Operating in today’s rapidly changing environment makes it that much more critical to remain committed to constantly improving our customer experience through systematic analysis of feedback and the deployment of focused interventions to elevate customer experiences.
These three considerations are meaningful in different ways depending on the maturation of an organization. For an established retail company with customer service already deeply embedded in the organizational values, ramping up operations to pre-pandemic capacity might mean fortifying service recovery methodology so that unique service issues are identified and corrected before a customer is lost to a bad experience.
In another scenario, a healthcare services company opening its doors for the first time in a post-pandemic world might focus on building operational procedures around an ideal patient journey map to ensure that service standards are always attained.
For any organization, however, it is important to realize that a great customer experience cannot wait for training, and training cannot interrupt our ability to provide top-notch service. With the right tools and planning, we can do both simultaneously and see the accumulation of happy customers and employees grow together as a result.
