No matter the size of your field service business or what industry you’re in, employee engagement is essential to your success. By engaging with your employees in a meaningful way you can ensure that every member of your team drives your company toward its goals, from the day they’re hired to the day that they retire.
Companies that are able to create and sustain systems that allow for a positive employee culture position themselves for greater success. By building this culture around the core competencies of employee recognition, participation, and feedback, your field service business can differentiate itself from the competition in order to attract and retain the all-star employees you need to deliver outstanding customer service.
Employee Recognition
One of the easiest changes to implement when it comes to sparking employee development is a protocol for employee recognition. A system for recognizing your employees’ successes and accomplishments shows your crew that you value their hard work and dedication and that you recognize their efforts to improve the quality of their work.
By making the effort to make sure your employees’ efforts don’t go unrecognized, you foster an environment in which your team knows their hard work isn’t wasted. Recognizing your employees’ efforts can have a drastic impact when it comes to motivating your staff and boosting morale by helping your employees feel valued and appreciated.
What’s more, employee recognition can have the secondary benefit of improving the way your customers and prospects view your business. Publicly recognizing outstanding efforts from your employees on social media gives your company a face and helps customers to feel an inherent connection to your business. This is doubly true in situations where recurring customers get to the individual members of your business through repeat visits and see their efforts being recognized online.
In addition to outwardly recognizing your employees’ achievements, consider implementing a rewards system to incentivize your workforce. Surveying your customers and using a simple point-based ranking system for how your employees handle customer-facing interactions can encourage them to always put their best foot forward, nurture an ongoing commitment to improving customer service, and spark new ideas for how to further impress your customers.
Employee Participation
When you’re considering the best ways to communicate with your employees and make sure that they know how much you appreciate them, it can be easy to start making plans on your own or with other members of upper management. This approach, however, can often fail to account for what your employees actually want.
Encouraging your employees to attend meetings, contribute new ideas, and communicate with you and other managers freely—and making sure they feel comfortable doing so—can instantly improve the way you do business. As the face of your business, your employees in the field are often on the frontlines when it comes to changes in customer demands, new tools or methods within your industry, and how effective your everyday processes are.
When you encourage open dialogue between yourself and your employees, you’re likely to gain valuable insights into how your business can simultaneously serve customers better and make employees happier. This also established an environment in which your employees feel more invested in your business’s future and overall success.
While you work to improve communication with your employees, don’t forget about what you can learn from an employee rewards system like the one we mentioned above. A simple point-based system can help you to identify which of your employees are performing best in the field; from there you can use their knowledge to help guide and train employees who are struggling.
Employee Feedback
In addition to encouraging open communication, you should also be procuring formalized feedback from your staff. Using employee surveys and scorecards is common practice for companies that successfully build a positive company culture.
This is an important opportunity for employees who might not escalate issues or voice new ideas or opinions even when you do your best to keep communication open. Ensure your employees know that surveys are anonymous, that way you can have a clear sense of how your employees are feeling, learn how they think things can improve, and even find areas of success within your organization that you might not know about.
A dependable method for tracking progress toward consistently impressing your customers is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) system. NPS systems use a scoring system to evaluate your company’s performance in two different ways. First, you can use the system to determine how satisfied your existing customers are with the service you provide and how likely they are to refer your services to someone else. Second, you can establish how individual employees are performing in the eyes of your customers.
WorkWave’s easy-to-implement NPS system can be smoothly integrated into your operations processes with automated customer survey options that allow you to get the feedback you need to properly manage your business without adding to your workload. Emails can be automatically sent to customers after service is complete in order to easily secure customer feedback, including numerical values to represent customer satisfaction, how likely they are to refer you to their friends or family, and more. This provides you with a simple tool to measure your employees’ success in the field and how strongly your teams are performing.
By taking steps to ensure you’re enabling your employees to bring their best to the table every day, you can streamline your everyday efficiency and help your whole business to reach its full potential. To learn more about how WorkWave Service can help you do exactly that, visit us online and schedule a free demo today!
