With so much attention on customer service in recent years and attempts at always making the customer happy, what happens on the employee side might sometimes be neglected. While there’s a constant business quest to perfect customer service and train employees to bring that to the customer, employees may not always live up to daily expectations. They may not feel inspired by your brand enough to commit to providing the customer service you count on.
How do you fix a problem like this? It might not be so easy as in providing employee raises or perks. Instead, you may have to rely on others in your team to light the fire of those less enthusiastic employees.
Can Raises or Perks Inspire an Employee?
The answer to this might be affirmative in a corporation where creative work is imperative to success. But in a business setting where employees partake in customer service, it works much differently. It doesn’t matter how much of a raise you give your employees, the bonuses they receive, or the perks you provide. If the employee doesn’t believe in what your brand is selling, a pay raise or that customer service training will be useless.
That’s why you may have to rely on other employees to inspire those employees toward truly believing in your brand. Who are those employees, though? Almost every business has a few workers who wholeheartedly believe in your brand ideal and demonstrate it every day. However, they may not be working up at the front counter where all your loyal customers buy your products.
Committed Employees Can Rally the Others
A recent article on LinkedIn about employee loyalty talked about who these particular employees are. They’re called Employee Ambassadors and provide true loyalty to what your brand stands for and in engaging customers. Whatever the reason is behind their drive to uphold your brand, you should realize how valuable it is. These people usually only make up about 20% of a business’s workforce.
Do you have these people up front in your business to engage with customers? If not, they should be placed there immediately. In fact, integrating them with the less committed employees has a strong possibility of creating an across-the-board spark.
Unless your lesser employees are completely unhappy with your business model, having them work around an employee who’s excited about your brand can easily be imitable. It can become a free training course in finding the inspiration behind your brand without having to fire 80% of your employees to start all over.
Go find those employee loyalists and have them mingle with the rest of your employees. Because the loyal staff believe so much in your products, the less committed staff can’t help but see that they simply didn’t get it before.
That’s your advantage here: A truly loyal and committed employee won’t fake his or her enthusiasm.