If your frontline employees aren't empowered, your customers feel it.

Your frontline employees set the stage for the customer experience. After all, they’re the first impression of what your company is all about. Frontline employees are constantly observing how your customers interact with your offerings, so they are much better sources of information than conventional research. When you fail to engage and empower them, you are missing out on opportunities for customer experience improvements, product upgrades and tons of valuable insights. 

Performance suffers when your frontline employees aren't engaged

When hard work and dedication is recognized, people tend to go the extra mile—and vice versa. But this is only part of the equation. A recent Gallup study found that although there are 2.7 billion front-line workers globally, only 13 percent feel engaged at work. An unmotivated and disengaged staff will make itself known as traces of the evidence carry over into customer interactions. 

Customers can easily identify an unhappy agent and it’s a bad look for the organization. The subtle undertones of a dispirited rep will slip out during their conversations with current and prospective customers. An engaged and empowered employee experience is the ultimate business edge. Without it, customer experience is destined to fail.

Have a little faith in your frontline

Do your customer-facing teams have the ownership to make decisions on their own? Are they tied down with strict phone or email scripts, rather than encouraged to have natural and human conversations? The first and most powerful marker of a listening enterprise is how a company treats its frontline employees—and the level of empowerment they give to the frontline. But allowing reps to use their better judgment as to when to offer refunds or make policy exceptions is just scratching the surface. 

Listening encourages valuable conversations

When team members know they’re being heard, they are far more inclined to speak up. Frequent and honest communication paves the way for positive change. Weekly or monthly town halls can help companies prove they value the voice of all team members. Agents should feel comfortable discussing customer frustrations and personal roadblocks with their managers, team members and the organization as a whole.  

If your frontline is an untapped information reservoir, it’s time to rethink your company’s strategy. 

Tethr has your back

At Tethr, we help businesses make the shift from monitoring their frontline employees to engaging them. Rather than making sure agents are sticking to a script, saying and doing the things the company has decided are important to deliver a great customer experience (e.g., saying the customer’s name three times, thanking the customer for her loyalty, etc.) we help identify the things that actually make a difference to your customers and your bottomline. Your frontline must be empowered to deliver the best experience to your customers and your call center reps should be encouraged to use a combination of best practice and their own judgment to guide customers.

Request a demo to discover how Tethr can help you better engage your frontline employees.