Improve customer satisfaction by measuring employee engagement

If your employees aren’t engaged with their jobs, they probably aren’t representing your organization well. Engaged employees understand how their role contributes to your company’s mission and vision, giving them a sense of value and pride that motivates them to do a good job. You can ensure your company is represented well by increasing employee engagement. Numerous studies have shown that a dissatisfied employee is unlikely to provide good customer service or to pass vital customer feedback up the chain.

For example, a Gallup poll found that 70 percent of American workers are either not engaged or actively disengaged. But diagnosing engagement problems can be as difficult as curing them. Disengagement is a complex issue that can stem from many sources like unclear (or unpromising) career paths, poor managerial relationships, or an unpleasant work environment. What can you do to identify problems and provide employees with the motivation they need to offer good customer service?

Engaged employees are more enthusiastic about their role and look for other ways to contribute to the organization's success by going above and beyond the scope of their job description. Employee engagement reflects how an employee contributes to the company's overall needs, stakeholders, and community. Engaged employees understand the importance of customer satisfaction is directly related to customer experience, ultimately contingent on employee satisfaction. 

TIP: Measure employee satisfaction at your company with online questionnaires. 

Employees who demonstrate more commitment to their job and organization provide a better customer experience. Satisfied employees have a more positive attitude that affects their job performance and strengthens their engagement with customers resulting in higher customer satisfaction ratings. 

TIP: Measure customer satisfaction with employee engagement surveys.

Customer experience and employee engagement work together. A decline in customer satisfaction can be the result of many issues. However, it's important to recognize your employees have direct contact with customers and their approach, attitude, and ability to problem solve will directly impact a customer's experience. An employee's engagement level will determine their performance and ultimately reflect your customer satisfaction feedback. 

The best way to find out what employees think of their jobs and your organization is simply to ask them. You can do this with informal interviews or company-wide surveys—there’s no right or wrong. But in order to improve this critical customer touchpoint, you need to ask the right questions.

Here are some tips for understanding employees’ level of engagement:

Once you know what’s working for your employees and what’s not, you can focus in on the things that make a big difference. This focus can help you get results right away. Because you’ll be able to create the right incentives, see where there’s friction between management and the rank and file, and ultimately have a more thoughtful approach to building a great team.

These sorts of improvements can pay big dividends when better products and services make their way to customers. Improved satisfaction and loyalty are likely to follow. When employees and customers are happy, it’s the ultimate win-win.

If you want to create an employee engagement surveys, we’ve got a few tools that can help. Our survey experts partnered with the Society of Human Resource Management Foundation (SHRMF) to write a series of employee engagement survey templates. You can use them as-is, or customize them to meet your organization’s needs. See sample questionnaires here:

For other ways to improve customer satisfaction, check out our free eGuide: 6 Keys to Satisfaction, Loyalty & Love.

The most efficient way to understand how your employees feel about their job, development, and future within your organization is to ask them. Online surveys provide employees with the ease of thoughtfully answering questions on their own time. It also takes the pressure down compared to in-person interviews where they'd have to answer questions immediately. 

You can create your own employee engagement survey, or use a SurveyMonkey employee engagement template that can be customized to fit your specific employee satisfaction and customer service assessments. 

When constructing an employee engagement and customer satisfaction survey, always consider how much time it should take to complete. Formatting can play into the timing and the type of questions you ask. Your choice of distribution can also play a role in your survey completion rate. Most importantly, properly assessing feedback can provide valuable insights to help you implement a plan to improve employee engagement. Let's get a little more detailed with some best practices for constructing employee engagement surveys. 

Now that you know about the benefits of employee engagement for customers, explore SurveyMonkey solutions to learn the levels of employee satisfaction. Sign up for free to start discovering the correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. 

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