Your employees are the points of contact with your customer. To build customer loyalty you must first build employee loyalty. Your employees can only share their excitement with friends, family, and customers only when they have bought into your culture themselves. So, here are five tips for building employee loyalty.
Hire With Patience
Firstly, it comes down to who and who are in your team. If customer loyalty is important to you, then you cannot afford to have someone that is unsuitable in your team. It might actually be better to leave a position unfilled, rather than to hastily employ someone that won't be enthusiastic about your business.
The consequences of hiring the wrong person for a job are usually profound. When it comes to hiring top performers, especially your salespeople, you better stop rushing the hiring process. One bad apple could spoil the whole bunch. If your organization is aiming for superb customer service, a single disagreeable or unresponsive team member can erode customer loyalty and team morale. So, establish an objective sales hiring process that ensures you won't make the wrong hire out of desperation. Remember, all good things come to those who wait.
Good Training could help
Ensure your employees have the proper training and tools they need to enhance customer experience. In building employee loyalty, you do not only need to become an expert at recruiting, you also need to become a guru in training your employees for best performance. This also mean there is a need for you to be loyal to your employees as well. If you are loyal to your employees, they'll feel good about their jobs and pass that loyalty along to your customers. So, try as much as possible to be consistent in your decisions and actions. Seek every opportunity to display a willingness to protect your employee. Doing these and listening to your employees will reveal the kind of information you might hitherto not be privy to.
Pet Friendly Work Environment
A recent study by researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University found that having dogs at work increases job satisfaction, lowers stress and boosts employee loyalty. Likewise, this explains why allowing dogs at work are increasingly becoming popular among creative firms. According to a recent article in Inc.com, TRX Training, G5, The Squires Group, and One Call Now, are examples of companies that now embrace dog-friendly work environments for their employees. The article made a submission that dog-friendliness may generate more loyalty for the company as a whole. Examining your policies for the accommodation of pet, especially for employees that have companion dogs, might be a good idea to further build your employee loyalty.
Themed Rewards
One of the common errors most business owners commit is the thinking that cash reward is all that is needed to earn an employee's loyalty. Cash is not a long-term motivator for employees, its motivating power only lasts for few hours. Finding other simple and thoughtful ways to engage with your employee rather than pay them off could be more effective for building employee loyalty. The idea is that you need to show them you truly care. This is where thoughtful theme reward system comes to play. For instance, creating a theme reward around holidays, seasonal activities, and cultural trends could be effective. This is the type of successful promotional approach that retailers have used over the ages. Giving them a simple custom gift like US flags for their kids during July 4th holiday could show them how much you care. Another example of theme rewards is giving them a custom phony money which can make them be redeemed for gifts at the end of a quarter. Other reward systems like swapping your desk with your employee for a day have been proven to be effective for building employee loyalty as well.