A Gallup study found that companies with highly engaged employees have 18% more sales because their teams are more likely to go above and beyond to improve customer service.

People are at the heart of every great experience. Through our work with leading global brands, we have seen the direct correlation between engaged teams, arise in customer satisfaction and in turn sales and profit.

If like us and business leaders like Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Group, you believe that engaged employees = great customer service, then we must ask ourselves, “How will I give my customer-facing teams a great experience?”.

Here are 5 things to focus on:

1.   Provide meaning:  Everyone wants to feel part of something and to know that what they do matters and contributes to something bigger. Co-creating vision and purpose, and communicating with impact are great places to start, whilst making a connection between what your business does and its social impact has never been more important, especially for our Gen-Z employees.   Once that’s in place, keeping alignment day-to-day is essential. A great way to do this is ensuring that individual objectives and recognition are overtly aligned to goals, so that employees know what is required and why it is valued.

2.   Enable managers:  The people we work with most closely have the biggest influence on our satisfaction. It’s critical therefore that line managers who you’ve entrusted to lead your teams have been selected, trained, assessed, and lead themselves in such a way that they effectively listen, empathise, empower, stretch, motivate and manage performance.  They also need to be enabled and empowered to do what they need to do for their teams - if not, everyone is in for a bumpy ride! 

3.   Make it personal:  Think about ways to personalise your approach for the people in your teams. Creating opportunity and stretch goals tailored to an individual’s strengths and ambitions, and recognising personal contribution and success is powerful.  Similarly getting to know individuals and being able to recognise their life events shows care and that they’re more than ‘just a number’.

4.   Consider how it feels for them: Regularly consider how things feel for the team and what can be done to make things better; this is essential when designing new processes or products and services.  Through employee engagement surveys, focus groups and exercises such as ‘back to the floor’ we can understand how our teams, who are closest to our customers, are feeling and what their ideas are to make things better. By considering things from the employee’s perspective, and testing new concepts with them, you’re more likely to design simpler, more efficient, and easier to apply solutions that will put your employees in a better mindset when using them or selling them to your customers.

5.   Ensure there’s a consequence: Finally, it’s all too easy to focus on the softer things that will engage employees, but nothing will disengage hard working employees (the ones who are most likely to be highly engaged) more, than seeing others get away with bad behaviours and poor performance. There has to be a consequence when someone isn’t contributing positively. By being consistent and transparent in applying the ‘consequence’, you’ll improve overall performance, inspire positive contributions, and avoid the “what’s the point” attitude setting in.

If we want our customers to have a great experience, we need to give our employees a great experience too; that way they’re more likely to be inspired to bring their best self to their interactions with our customers which in turn delivers that all important business performance.

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Ethos Farm, Forbes Business Council Thought Leader