Do you struggle with customer satisfaction scores?
We tell you why employee knowledge is the key to satisfied customers and how you can make your staff more knowledgeable.
According to a customer survey by American Express (2017) 62% of people said that an employee's knowledge or resourcefulness was key to them having a positive service experience. It has also been reported that 84% of consumers are frustrated when a sales assistant does not have the correct information (ThinkJar Research).
Despite the rise in technology to improve customer service, it is evident that customers still rely on the knowledge of real human employees. When customers don't get the right knowledge or help it can leave them feeling deeply frustrated and make them want to take their custom elsewhere. In order for you to really boost your customer satisfaction scores, you need to ensure that your staff have the right knowledge and tools to deliver the kind of helpful service that your customers are looking for. You can create more knowledgeable employees by:
Ensuring information is easily and readily available to them at all times
Making it easy for them to boost their product knowledge
Empower them to learn and develop in their own time
Ensure employees have all the information they need right at their fingertips
There really is no use in having helpful information buried in emails, folders or documents which take employees a lot of time to find or get to. When they are busy trying to serve impatient customers, information needs to be available to them fast! Think about how fast we can find the answers to anything we need on Google, this should be the same for your employees when searching for work-related information.
By deploying a digital knowledge app which can be downloaded right onto your staff's very own mobile device, it means you can have a resource which is exactly like Google for your business! This saves employees having to search Google for the answer which could end up with them trawling through pages of irrelevant information. By having a business knowledgebase it means all answers will be from your company meaning search queries will be more easily answered which saves your staff a lot of time.
You will be able to build your knowledgebase incredibly easy, as every time staff look for an answer that isn't available to them, you could have a button which they could press to report any missing answers.
Make it easy for them to boost their product knowledge
Having new information easily available to staff is essential, but so is ensuring they can easily learn all of it. This will make sure they become more and more efficient when serving your customers.
To make it easy there should be options for staff to quickly learn at every opportunity. For example, if they are searching for help on how to deal with faulty items, the article should have a learning option which asks if they would like to answer a few short questions to ensure they have fully understood the article. You should also have learning suggestions, for example with Oplift Engage the platform recommends relevant learning playlists which will help the user learn more information within that topic area E.g. A useful playlist would have other articles such as 'How to deal with returns' or 'What counts as a faulty item' etc. This will ensure that even though staff can be more autonomous with their learning, they are still guided so that they have a more holistic understanding of the area which they are learning about.
Gamification is another great way to boost employee knowledge in a fun and convenient way. Virgin Media chose a gamification solution which gave their staff just three daily challenges, this ensured that employees answered product questions every day which made it easy for them to boost their knowledge. From the gamification solution alone they saw a 7.4% increase in customer satisfaction levels along with a 13% increase in sales in just 6 months.
Empower your staff to learn and develop in their own time
As learning and development coaches you want your employees to actively engage with their learning and to have a genuine desire to be curious and find out new things. However, if they can't get to the information easily then the chances of them making the effort to find it are minimal. By ensuring your learning solutions are easily available on your staff's own mobile devices you put learning into the hands of your employees which has been proven to boost engagement and improve results.
So what do you need to look out for when choosing a mobile learning solution for your company?
Offline working – Allow your staff to learn even when the internet isn't available to them! This is perfect for staff who don't have access to a desk and are always on the move in various places. It is also great because it means on boring commutes to work when they can't access their personal apps because they have lost connection, they may just learn something new on your company app to pass the time.
Simplicity – Mobile devices only offer a small screen space, so it is vital that your mobile learning tool is simple and easy to use. Anything that looks cramped or confusing is going to put your users off.
iOS and Android – You may be dazzled by an app only to find out it is only available on iOS OR Android, to avoid this check it works on both so that everyone can use it.
Analytics – This is essential to ensure that you can tailor your material to make it the most engaging it can be. With analytics, you should be able to find out knowledge gaps, find out what’s popular and who has read what.
Build a positive learning cycle
Once your staff start seeing the benefit of better customer relationships and increased sales because of their learning, it will encourage them to learn more and take an active role in their own development! This builds a positive learning cycle that you do not have to keep forcing, which means sustained results. 👍
