Employee Recognition and the Customer Experience

We all know how great it feels to be appreciated for our contributions; yet frequently we forget to apply this to the business environment. For customer experience leaders looking to change the internal culture of their business, employee recognition is an especially powerful tool to have in your arsenal. The following are four ways in which employee recognition can help you reach your customer experience goals:

1. Employee recognition is highly motivating.

89% of employees say that positive feedback is their biggest motivator, yet only 39% get any feedback, be it positive or negative.

What This Means for the Customer Experience: Take time to recognize the work employees are already doing to fix your customer experience. Appreciating these existing efforts will motivate them to continue pursuing the company’s CX goals.
Source: 3 Reasons "Managers" Do Not Get the Most out of Employees

2. Employee recognition will prevent turnover.

Tom Rath and Donald Clifton, authors of How Full is Your Bucket, claim that the number one reason employees leave an organization is because they do not feel appreciated.

What This Means for the Customer Experience: Turnover erodes the quality of the customer experience. It raises wait times, lowers customer satisfaction, and causes irritations for both customers and employees. Make sure your workers know that their tenure is appreciated.
Source: How Full is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life

3. Employee recognition nurtures high performance.

“In the workplace itself, researcher Marcial Losada has found that among high-performing teams, the expression of positive feedback outweighs that of negative feedback by a ratio of 5.6 to 1,” writes HBR Blogger Tony Schwartz, “By contrast, low-performing teams have a ratio of .36 to 1.”

What This Means for the Customer Experience: If you want to accelerate the performance of your team, then start with focusing on positive feedback.
Source: Why Appreciation Matters So Much

4. Employee recognition creates a sense of purpose.

We found in our own research that employees who are told when they have done a good job serving customers are 1.5 times as likely to feel a sense of purpose in their work.

What This Means for the Customer Experience: Make it easy for your employees to feel passionate about their work by closely connecting them to your customers.
Source: Employee Engagement Trends Report

~Janessa Lantz