5 Ways to motivate your staff at the start of a New Year
It’s a brand-new year. Your students may still be on winter break, but now is a perfect time to motivate your staff around common goals for the upcoming semester.
As certain as it’s 2018, delivering a positive customer experience, or in your case a positive student experience, is probably a top priority. CX usually starts and ends with the people and infrastructures they interact with on a daily basis. Therefore, before students return from their long winter’s nap, here are a few ways you can leverage technology to boost the student experience and get your staff enthusiastic about it.
Motivating your staff at the start of the New Year might be a little easier if you follow these five tips.
1. Incentive Rapid Response Times
Incentives, rewards, positive reinforcement – make it part of your operations. With 47 percent of consumers expecting companies to respond to them within one hour and 84 percent expecting a response within 24 hours[i], your college or university should make rapid-response a celebrated virtue!
With real-time customer feedback solutions like Touchwork, you and your staff can make it easy for students to leverage SMS to report an issue, leave a comment, or offer feedback. This type of technology can then automate an instant response, and you and your team will be notified immediately. Set goals for how quickly you want your team to respond to student feedback and issue reports, then reward your team when they meet or exceed expectations.
2. Communicate Often
A staff that is communicated with is more likely to remain aligned with goals and priorities. Help them see how they fit into the larger picture, and they won’t just feel more valued and appreciated, but they will be more motivated to contribute their talents.
One way to better communicate with your staff at the start of the New Year is to show them what the students think of your services. Auxiliary service employees may never know what students think about the services they provide if you never tell them. Therefore, as part of your staff meetings, consider sharing recent student feedback and highlight a few issues that may have been reported. Then, you can close the loop by informing your team of resolutions and publicly acknowledge staff members who delivered excellent service.
3. Leverage Feedback Solutions Internally, Too
Real-time feedback solutions don’t just have to be used for your students and customers. Leverage CX technology for internal use as well. This can help empower your staff to contribute their voice to how things are going and add to the ongoing conversation you have with them about delivering the best service possible.
What’s great about utilizing a feedback solution internally is that it exposes each employee to the same technology the students are using to communicate with you. And the better your staff understands it, the better they will be at identifying future opportunities for enhanced CX and future uses for the technology.
4. Trust Them
Show you trust your employees by letting them do their job. Setting parameters, expectations, and processes is crucial, but you probably don’t have to micro manage.
Let your staff deliver a great student experience every day. Don’t keep student feedback that comes through to management via SMS or other digital means a secret from the individuals who are interfacing with your customers on a daily basis. One way you can make them more directly responsible for customer service responses is to filter real-time feedback to a staff member on duty other than the director or manager. Consider electing a “customer care captain” each shift and allow him or her to manage student responses.
5. Be Transparent
Being transparent with your staff might be the simplest (and scariest) ways to motivate them. While you don’t need to communicate any and all possible changes on the horizon, you can share the reasons why new changes are getting implemented.
For instance, if you have created a new menu item, rearranged seating in the dining hall, or adjusted hours of operation, share the feedback you received from the students. It may sound small, but helping your staff understand what helps motivate executive decisions can go a long way in keeping your employees motivated, because they feel respected and included.
As you prepare for the start of a new semester on campus, help your employees kick off the New Year on a motivated foot by continuing or implementing some of these tactics. Happy employees are the best type of employees you want interacting with your valued students. And with easy-to-use technology at your fingertips, everyone from your staff to your customers can reap the benefits of real-time connection.
References:
[i] http://www.altitude.com/resources/omnichannel-evolution-of-customer-experience
