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Is Poor Morale Effecting Your Customer Service?

Is Poor Morale Affecting Your Customer Service?

Have you ever looked at the connection between the morale in your business and the level of service that is provided to your clients and their families? Morale in your workplace affects all operations, from customer service to productivity. If employees do not feel respected and appreciated, they are unlikely to seem cheery when interacting with your customers. When employees are serving customers, an "I don’t care" attitude becomes a public perception of your business.

To create a climate of outstanding customer service, first you must convey to employees that you care about them. Employees want to feel that they are important, they are making a difference, and they are valuable. The foundation of these principles is how employees are respected. In my new book, Retaining Your Employees: Using Respect, Recognition, and Rewards for Positive Results (Crisp Publications), I cover the Seven Rules of Respect. These rules will provide you with a model to determine whether you are truly providing respect in the workplace. Respect is not something that can be delivered overnight. It must be built one day at a time, using patience and self-control.

In customer service, customers’ requests or difficulties often require representatives to check into them and then get back with the customer. In order to give outstanding customer service, providing a timely response is critical. This is standard operating procedure for most businesses. But have you ever had someone tell you that they would get back to you by the end of the business day and found yourself, three days later, still waiting for the response? These days, virtually everyone has encountered this.

Managers become upset when customers are not dealt with in a timely matter, yet often do not respond to employees promptly. In the employer’s mind, it is critical to respond promptly to the customer—but an employee’s request for a pay raise or to attend a professional development conference can sit on the employer’s desk for days or weeks without an acknowledgement. The message sent to the employee is that the customer is very important but the employee who represents the business is not important. Morale begins to lag, and the once-prompt and friendly employees feel less enthusiastic toward their jobs.

In building respect in the workplace many components must be in place. Do you have a policy against yelling or speaking rudely with customers? It seems like a silly question—of course you do! But does that same standard apply to supervisors or mangers who interact with employees? Could you have a different approach to dealing with customers and employees within your business? Are you employees encouraged to say please and thank you to the customers—and do you do the same with your employees?

According to Dr. Gerald Graham, Wichita State University, 58% of the employees said they seldom, if ever, received a thank you from their manager. Would you find yourself in that 58%?

To improve customer service within businesses, owners or managers often look at how many complaints have been logged, how quickly were they handled, whether the customers were evidently satisfied, and so on. These criteria are important. However, it may be more helpful if the first step was to observe and determine how the employees are being treated within your business. Are they being treated, as you would like your customers to be treated? If not, why? Your employees will mirror the treatment that you provide to them and pass it along to your customers.

Providing outstanding customer service must first begin with how you treat your employees. The road is not an easy one, but you will reap the rewards of your efforts by building a hard-to-leave workplace that will result in satisfied customers that will return to your business time and time again. That’s the ultimate goal, right?