Your business operations consist of many tasks that must be completed daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly to run smoothly. But if these processes are not synchronized and standardized, you are inviting chaos and costs. Fundamentally, standardization helps your employees to have an established, time-proofed approach to use. It decreases uncertainty and guesswork, guarantees quality, and boosts employee’s productivity.
However, these are not the only benefits. For example, work standardization also helps customer support representatives do their job better and thus improve customer experiences (CX).
#1 Introduce Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
Your expectations as a manager should not be implied. Instead, you have to show your employees what you expect to be done and give them support and resources to meet those expectations. That means you need to transfer all work practices and processes on paper by drafting and implementing a standard operating procedure. These written step-by-step processes guide employees on how to complete specific, repetitive tasks.
For example, you can have an SOP on customer service functions like onboarding and offboarding clients, marketing activities like creating and publishing content, sales functions like putting together a bid or proposal, or HR functions like recruiting new team members. Sound standard operating procedures always state the goal of the process, when it needs to be done, whose responsibility it is, and what resources are available.
#2 Implement Customer Experience Management
The average customer has little knowledge about the multiple interactions between different departments before receiving their services. Misaligned processes and isolated systems become evident when customers have a frustrating experience with companies.
Staff working with customers should not be juggling multiple applications and systems. Instead, they need one platform, which automatically pulls and analyzes all the data required to handle customer feedback and inquiries. That being said, you need to facilitate and smoothen your everyday customer-related operations by implementing a customer experience management platform. This tool dramatically speeds up first touch resolution, exponentially shortens the total time for inquiry or dispute resolution, helps you analyze customers’ data and monitor trends in one integrated solution.
#3 Anticipate Productivity Increases and Employee Satisfaction
When you standardize your company’s operating procedures and processes, your team can do more things in less time. In addition, they can do the initial task more smoothly because they have a detailed list of what to do. And along the process, you save money because you will not have to redo anything or correct mistakes as you go. Furthermore, standardizing processes also eliminate inter-office competition and conflict so that employees can accomplish their tasks productively and efficiently. And when they perform a set task correctly, they feel a sense of pride, boosting employee morale in the process.
Most importantly, when your employees have a positive attitude towards their work and are fully engaged, this assertive approach quickly spills over into customer relationships. As a result, satisfied employees efficiently strive to fulfill high-quality service with a lot of consistency, enhancing customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty.
#4 Reinforce New Standards in a Participatory Manner
Employees matter in every business, and there is an undeniable connection between a company’s employee knowledge and the experience they deliver to their customers. For that reason, companies need to ensure employees understand how to comply with new guidelines and comprehend why they are essential to customers.
In addition, for employees across the company to learn, customer experience standards that are implemented through SOPs or management platforms must be integrated into the company’s learning culture. They must become an integral part of how employees do their jobs rather than an isolated initiative. That said, include CX in welcome packages for newbies, coaching programs, and ongoing skills training curricula. That is the smoothest way to ensure the reinforcement of CX standards in a participatory manner.
#5 Expect High-Quality Results
Misunderstandings, non-standardization, and errors not only lead to tasks fail, but it can result in a lack of consistent quality too. Even if your employees do a great job, different methods of doing a specific task will inevitably lead to different outcomes and thus different quality. That said, to maximize quality results, you need to introduce standard processes that reduce the opportunity for mistakes, primarily if everything is clearly written out. So, as long as your company’s managers or project leaders enforce the standards, the quality of your products will remain consistent.
The Bottom Line
Even internal processes that do not directly involve the end customer, such as accounts payable, can significantly impact a customer’s experience. For this reason, every business needs to opt for process standardization to free up time and resources for personnel to focus on high-value and customer-focused engagements. And even though standardization requires a systemic understanding of your customer needs, the products you offer, and your employee’s experiences, starting with the above approaches can save time and give you ideas from which your company and your customers can benefit in the long run. As a result, you will soon see improved customer experiences and more empowered and efficient employees.
