The topic of this article is improving the client experience to drive client retention. We are writing it for the ops staff to show them this and several other goals can be achieved through the adoption of employee scheduling tools. We will explore the different elements it addresses and how this helps your strategy.
Very often businesses utilising shift workers suffer from high turnover rates - of both employees and clients. The common cause of that is prioritising quantity over quality and that’s the connection between the two. For example, a business that prioritises having more clients will naturally need more employees - which will mean they won’t be able to afford to hire many high expertise workers which are likely to reflect on the quality. Upon receiving services that aren’t up to their expectations, the newly acquired clients are likely to leave. And so will be the staff that will be interested in pursuing growth and therefore better pay opportunities.
In other words, the company will be at square zero. And the cycle will keep on repeating until their approach changes. When begin they prioritising client retention and relationship building, they will naturally strive toward providing better quality. And alas it’s a longer game, it ensures sustainable company growth as opposed to non-progressive dipping into potential client pool.
Your Clients’ Needs Should Be a Priority
The name of this section does not mean ‘the client is always right’, however. Very often the reason your company is hired is that the client understands their expertise is not on the level they need to achieve the goal. This basically means they are putting their money and trust in your services, which is also inclusive of the guidance. Simply put, as an expert, you are expected to draw a roadmap for your clients - this would include outlining their needs and separating them from the ways.
The issue arises from the fact that the clients aren’t always capable of that and can therefore be argumentative of your judgement to the point of offering you a higher pay just so you prioritise what you’ve deduced to be ‘wants’. If you really want to provide the best client experience possible, you will be able to push back. For this, you will need actual data to fall back on - and such data is collected by the software you use, including but not limited to scheduling tools.
Claim Back and Repurpose Time
It’s difficult to focus on providing the client with the best experience when most of your time is spent on essential yet repetitive business processes. Employee scheduling tools are meant to take some of the said tasks off your hands, freeing up the time you can then repurpose for more client-orientated jobs. An hour a day spent on collecting customer feedback or acting in regard to it instead of building a rota for your staff may not seem like a lot - but it will certainly have a huge impact.
Avoid Being Understaffed
Anyone in the shift-based work environment knows that being understaffed is the worst. Not only does it put a massive strain on the employees who work at their full capacity, but this is often the reason behind failing client experience. While the company might expect the client to understand the situation, the client is often left feeling they are not provided with the quality service they’ve paid to. Although in many cases this doesn’t sour the relationship itself, it might leave a bit of a bitter taste.
Most employee scheduling tools are generally designed to help you avoid such situations. While the majority see them as simple means of convenience that help to save time by not building rotas manually, their real benefit is greater. Since modern technology doesn’t stop improving, most shift scheduling solutions are capable to learn from the data they collect. With that said, they can understand your business peak hours and quiet periods to then build schedules in accordance with it. Based on these trends, the software will then be allocating the amount of workforce that proved to be most optimal in a similar scenario before. The more you use the tool, the more accurate its insights will be. Ultimately, you will be able to solve the problem of understaffing/overstaffing once and for all.
Focus on Client Success
The key factor in ensuring a better client experience is understanding and catering to their success better. Unfortunately, that cannot be achieved unless there’s ongoing two-side communication. It’s important to remember that you are the expert, and therefore while the client may have a long list of wants, you’re in a better position to outline the needs. Depending on how different these are, it may be difficult to assure the client your proposal is the best way forward. And, if there’s so effective communication or clear expectations, the client experience will suffer.
As stated in the beginning, it can be difficult to find time to put effort into an individual client’s success when there are so many internal business processes to maintain on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, many companies fail precisely because they prioritise sustenance-driving processes over improving client experience. To put it shortly, if clients are unable to reach their goals with your company, they won’t stick around. With that said, although automation software is an investment - it’s a very much needed one that brings ROI in a form of client retention. When you hand over processes like payroll, scheduling and others to machines, you will have the time to work with humans.
Smoothening Internal Processes
Since employee scheduling tools are generally created for internal use, it’s within their primary purpose to streamline team management processes. There are a lot of moving parts that go into building rotas, and although often overlooked, mismanagement of that can reduce your company’s performance and team alignment. By employing the right tools, not only will you avoid it but actually improve both areas.
Added Layer of Flexibility
Not only will you have more room to wiggle timewise, but a shift scheduling solution will also grant you more freedom in terms of how you run your business. Let’s go back to the example of being understaffed. It doesn’t always happen due to a miscalculation on your part - sometimes it occurs with no notice as the allocated staff members call in sick, or if some sort of an emergency happens.
Unless you are flexible, you won’t be able to meet clients' expectations. In this specific scenario, you can gain quick visibility of the available staff without having to rake through the papers. And to then allocate the vacant shift to them. Additionally, an employee scheduling platform can be programmed to send out a notification to the rest of the team that a shift in question has freed up. Which bleeds right into our next section.
Improved Communication
Referring to the above sample, automation features of a rota building tool give more autonomy for the workers to communicate with one another in order to put together most optional schedules. Depending on the size of your team, chances are your on-site employees have deeper insights in one another’s personal lives and it’s, therefore, easier for them to predict the availability of another.
Not only can a scheduling tool become a platform for building efficient rotas, but also be a place to have both one-on-one and team conversations. Some solutions out there include live team chats, whereas others allow teams to communicate via notices, posts and comments in a similar manner to how a social media platform would. All in all, the right tool could really aid you in removing team communication bottlenecks that leads to smoother workforce distribution and therefore better quality of client experience.
Taking Care of Your Staff
While every business certainly needs to put their client first, you must not neglect your staff either. After all, they are the force driving your business forward. Scheduling software is aimed to make their duties a little more stress-free, and trust us when we say this gesture doesn’t go underappreciated. Don’t forget that your workers ultimately build the client experience - and if they are deflated, burnt out or generally displeased with the things in your company, it’s not likely to be positive.
Happy Employees Perform Better
There’s little need for scientific confirmation of this statement as most people have experienced it first hand - your performance is better when you’re happy. However, the University of Oxford went the extra mile and has proven that happy employees are indeed 13% more productive. While the very concept of happiness is different to everyone, it’s your duty as an employer to take steps of ensuring the basic factors are ticked. Such, for example, would be accommodating their time off needs and not scheduling them to work on the requested days.
It may sound like a demand that’s easy to meet, but very often it proves to be an issue. Simply put, if you still manage holiday requests via emails, these have a tendency to be either lost, forgotten or massively delayed. Having multiple managers involved in the approval process adds complexity to the situation, as the one who had approved the leave might not have communicated the decision to the rest. This results in the employee who’s supposedly off being scheduled, leading to frustration and potential financial losses. This can be easily sorted by a designated employee scheduling tool - and other similar employee happiness pillars can also be boosted by automation.
Summary
Client experience is a crucial component of ensuring client retention. Companies that make the mistake of relying on the acquisition of new clients as opposed to building long-term relationships normally go through a spurt of growth but are quick to lose their potential and fold. Investing in lesser client count but providing them with excellent client experience is a longer game, but it also brings massive payouts.
For companies that utilise the shift model, one of the best tools to aid in improving client experience is employee scheduling tools. They range in functionality from simply generating rota based on our staff availability to becoming a one-stop team communication platform. All in all, even the basic features help you achieve three things that contribute to serving your clients better: save time, improve your internal process and keep the workers happy.
Ready to give your client experience a boost? Let us know.
