The survival and relevance of any brand in the highly competitive global market today, hinge on customer satisfaction. Customers dictate the tune; they can make or mar your business with their reviews and referrals; a customer has truly become the king; happy, engaged customers are the surest means of ensuring the survival of your business through word of mouth marketing (WOMM).
A report by Salesforce Research reveals that an overwhelming 89% of consumers will be more willing to purchase again from a brand due to a positive customer service experience. The point to consider now is, who is responsible for customer service? The vivid answer is your workforce.
What this simply indicates if that your workforce management (WFM) is very crucial to the survival of your business. Initially, brands saw WFM as a means of scheduling staff, but this has greatly changed now.
You now need WFM to build, manage, and maintain a productive and efficient workforce. Technological advancements are enhancing the complete automation of WFM, and it has become essential for customer satisfaction and the success of your business to use an integrated set of processes to optimize your employees’ productivity.
What are the processes you must include in an efficient WFM for customer satisfaction?
1. Adequate staffing
Staffing is essential to good customer service; even where you have to deploy Chatbots to ensure round-the-clock service, you will still need some customers’ pain points to be addressed by humans. You need the necessary insights into staff requirements; you must map out the resources you need to ensure your projects are completed, especially when your employees have to go on annual vacations or maternity leaves.
When employees are made to stress themselves out, possibly due to understaffing, you can have issues of frustration, annoyance, and transferred aggression that will impact how they relate to customers.
2. Budgeting
You must ascertain the number of personnel your organization needs and the budget for that. Where you don’t have the funds ready, you may need to seek loans to ensure your employees go home with their pay packets.
Your employees have bills to pay as well as other responsibilities they must attend to financially, if they are not happy, they can never put in their best and that will tell on how your customers are handled. Budgeting is the blueprint you need to know how many employees you can carry on at a particular point in time.
3. Creating staff schedule
You now have WFM software that enables automated scheduling of tasks; based on your business variables, you know how to schedule for normal seasons of the year and when you have greater demands, maybe due to certain festivities that require more products or services. When staff scheduling was done manually, there were usually inconsistencies that left both customers and the organization dissatisfied, since an organization may not have the required manpower in certain critical conditions.
4. Time and attendance
How do your employees attend work? When do they report at their duty posts? Must customers wait for employees to come to work?
These are the necessary insights you need to have to ensure customer satisfaction. Incidentally, you can use WFM to get a clear picture of how and when your employees report for work.
The insight you get from using WFM enables you to have a grasp of demand changes, take care of lateness to duty and utter absenteeism, and perfect payroll accuracy.
5. Output management of employees
Do you know if your employees are giving you the right output? How do you measure their performance? Are your customers getting the expected value from your employees?
WFM gives you the necessary understanding of how productive your employees are. The insight you have enables you to focus more on what prompts employees’ productivity with the view of satisfying your customers and adding more value to the organization.
You can boost your employees’ morale by rewarding those who perform exceedingly well.
6. Compliance
You may be tempted to say what has WFM got to do with compliance, this, however, is rather tricky. There are a lot of laws and regulations that can affect your relationship with your employees; such regulations include union agreements, local, state, and federal laws that can lead to lawsuits if you fail to comply.
When you and your employees are bogged down with lawsuits, there is no way that you can satisfy your customers; you may not even have time for them. WFM enables you to be compliant with these laws and regulations that can cause unnecessary distractions.
You’ll be able to track certifications, training, and licenses with WFM and that ensures that you operate within the specifications of the laws.
7. Payroll and allowances
One area that causes a lot of disaffection between employees and their employers is the pay packet; it can lead to employees downing their tools and layoffs. Preparing payroll and calculating allowances manually, sometimes, is fraught with mistakes.
The automated systems of WFM make the processes involved in preparing payroll and calculation of allowances easier and faster. WFM enhances audit-ready custom reports and instant payment options.
8. Planning for leave and vacation
Enhancing paid time off (PTO) or personal time off is an important aspect of ensuring that employees are happy; happy employees are more productive, which ultimately ensures customer satisfaction. You make your employees happy if you have a single package which the PTO typifies that comprises your employees’ personal days off, sick days, and vacation time.
They will not need to start doing the mathematical calculations that are involved in the separate numbers of days allowable for each reason.
The bottom line is that customer satisfaction largely depends on employees’ productivity; WFM is a system that ensures that you are on the same page with your employees; you have all it takes with WFM to make your employees happy and more productive.
