It’s human nature. When we feel good about our work environment, when we feel trusted to do our work without micromanagement, when we have the tools to do our job, we do a better job. We’re more willing to go the extra mile for a colleague, partner, or customer and we feel great about it.
When your entire team, organization, company feels this way, the results for customers can be outsized.
Happy Employees → Happy Customers → Happy Shareholders.
In our last post, we spoke about the importance of trust in driving successful customer relationships. And, one pillar of building trust is delivering for customers at the point of need in the time of need. Doing so repeatedly over time will earn your customers’ trust driving repeat business, procurement of additional products and/or services, and referrals.
Image generated with help from Midjourney.
What does that have to do with employees?
Many of the most successful companies in the world are both “best places to work” and successful by investor standards. While these companies compete in different markets, they share a number of core values and ways of doing business.
At their core is the recognition that the people that work in the business – if they feel good about their work – will do a better job than if they don’t. And the result? Better customer outcomes due to more thoughtfully designed products and higher levels of customer service.
Do empowered employees provide better service?
Customer self-service is always the preference but inevitably, some issues require help from employees. This is a front-line employee: “customer-facing” in customer service, support, client delivery, or some other, similar, post-sale position. Or, it could be a partner who is delivering the post-sale service on behalf of your company.
You wouldn’t be surprised that these folks – your customer-facing employees and partners – ALSO want to self-serve to get answers, just like customers do. It’s far more efficient for a new employee in a support role to just be able to type their question in, and get the answer out, in clear, concise language than to message an SME and hope to get a prompt response.
Empowering customer-facing employees with the ability to self-serve makes them more productive, more autonomous, more capable and it provides customers with faster, more adept service when they can’t serve themselves.
“We’ve been giving our post-sale delivery and service folks tools for years,” you might say.
That’s the truth, but when it comes to enabling your CS, support, and post-sale delivery teams, the state-of-the-art has been siloed, searchable knowledge bases, one pagers, PDF manuals, even binders. Inevitably, everyone in support learns that the answers are in MANY places. Content creation in the Internet age – even inside an enterprise – has been democratized and the steady flow of content is neverending.
How does Embrace help deliver customer outcomes via employees?
Embrace.ai’s platform not only enables customers to self-serve. It also enables companies to activate conversational, AI-driven access to unlock the knowledge Support, CS, and client delivery needs, where the employees work. It’s like having an “Always-on Subject Matter Expert” ready to be invoked by your customer-facing teams.
Build trust with customers not just by empowering them, but by empowering the employees and partners that serve them.
Happy Employees → Happy Customers → Happy Shareholders
Text generated with help from Embrace. Images generated with help of Midjourney.