Everyone wants to improve their business. No one that owns a business should ever be comfortable with their current position. You should always strive to be better, no matter how good you are doing at the time. However, improving does not always meet on the customer side of your business, but rather how you handle your employees. After all, just like a business is nothing without customers, it is nothing without good employees.
So what are the ways you can improve your business on the employee level? You may be making some blunders that are greatly jeopardizing your employees happiness and wellbeing and not even know it.
Using customer feedback to determine what is wrong with your company.-
This may be one of the worst mistake a business owner can make. Sure, you want to listen to your customers feedback, but you will want to take what they have to say with a grain of salt. Why? Because what the customer says is one sided, and does not accurately describe the situation. If this situation happens with an employee too many times, and the employee does not get the opportunity to present their side of the story as well, then the employee will begin to have issues, especially when it comes to dealing with a problematic customer. Your employee may find it easier to walk away rather then deal with the situation. By avoiding this situation, or at the very least, allowing your employee to defend themselves, you will avoid a potentially hazardous situation.
Another form of this blunder is by producing feedback or survey forms, and basing any type of merit reward on these. The main reason that this will not work accurately is because of 2 facts. First, the customer is more likely to fill out a survey if something was not right, rather then excellent customer service. Second, the best employee in the world may never receive a survey review, while a bad employee, who just happens to be in a good mood that day, receives a few. This is unfair to everyone involved.
Introducing set merit rewards- Merits should be just that, rewards. Not all good deeds are the same, so they should not receive the same reward. Imagine if you were the employee who saved 15 customers from stopping service, and you received the same reward as the person next you did, yet they only saved 3. Would that make you feel unappreciated?
On the other end of the spectrum, you could use caution when rewarding employees for recovering from a foul up. If a employee messes up, and then corrects the problem, they probably should not receive a reward for it. This makes it seem acceptable to mess up, provided that you can redeem yourself.
Giving your employee a set way to sale products or deal with customers- You may think that your way of selling your product or business to customers is the perfect way to sell, and that everyone should use your approach. While your way of selling may work for you, it may not work for all of your employees. Why? Because everyone has a different personalities, and your way of selling just simply may not work for them. If you allow your employees freedom to sell, as long as their way is not immoral or harmful to your business, will benefit your business greatly.
