Justin Salisbury Tries a Little Recognition free essay sample

Justin Salisbury Tries a Little Recognition – Case Study 2 If your company and employees do not provide good customer service you are likely to lose existing business and miss out on new possibilities. It doesn’t take much for a customer to decide that you or your company isn’t worth his or her time, effort, or money. Since customer satisfaction is crucial to building a successful, growing business, what can you do to ensure that your company is providing good customer service? A few items to consider when establishing or developing customer service within your organization: Customer Wants and Needs, Service Culture, Trust and Loyalty, and Service Employees. Customer Wants and Needs, everyone makes daily purchasing decisions, therefore, everyone is a customer. Understanding the wants and needs of your customers prepares your customer service representatives with the necessary information to assist in the most effective manner. Service Culture, customer service is an important function of every employee. Every customer service encounter has the potential to gain repeat business or drive it away. Selecting the right people to interact with customers is extremely important. Every organization wants to avoid negative publicity, and in this era of social networking, it only takes a single Tweet or Face book status update to cause sufficient damage to a company’s reputation. Trust and Loyalty, It costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to maintain an existing one. Customers like to feel special and can be quickly lost when they sense that you don’t care about them. One bad experience can cost you that customer for life. In both good times and bad, the lifetime value of a customer is much greater than a series of single transactions from one-time customers. Service Employees, customer-facing employees portray the image of the company in the eyes of the consumer. Not all employees will value the importance of excellent customer service. It is important to evaluate individual behaviors, attitudes, and skills to determine who is most capable of holding a customer-facing position and invest in adequate training. A single customer encounter with an employee can make or break a sale (Shumpert, 2012). Meeting customer expectations might lead to customer satisfaction; however, in today’s competitive market world going above and beyond expectations will assure customer satisfaction. Companies with poor customer service risk losing probable customers, and often lose business rather than retain it. Acknowledging and focusing on Customer Wants and Needs, Service Needs, Trust and Loyalty and Service employees will enable businesses to develop a plan that will allow them to exceed customer expectations. Motivation is the most powerful emotion that employees bring to work. The management role in stimulating motivation through shared vision and communication is the fundamental skill that great managers bring to the workplace. Employees in management roles can learn to inspire motivation (Heathfield, 2013). What can managers do to motivate employees? The reality, when you talk about how to motivate employees, is that employees are motivated. The managers challenge is to figure out how to tap into that motivation to accomplish work goals. Fortunately, the manager controls the key environmental factors necessary to motivate employees. According to Forbes a few tips shared for managers to motivate employees are to Act as a role model and help inspire employees, clearly define the organizations vision, Empower your employees to succeed and Monitor the progress of your employees. Tip #1: Act as a role model and help inspire employees to identify what they are passionate about at work; then provide them with some projects in their area of passion or interest – a happy employee is a motivated employee! Tip #2: Clearly define the organization’s vision, mission and strategy as well as the goals and objectives of each employee (and include your employees in the crafting of these). Make sure everyone on your team understands the key role they play in contributing to the success of the department. Ensure each employee is in alignment toward the overall strategy so your group can work as a team and help each other out. Positive team energy will help motivate everyone. Tip #3: Empower your employees to succeed and delegate challenging and meaningful work – in general, people want to succeed and they want to continue learning and growing, so provide them with opportunities. Tip #4: Work with each employee to create their own personal development plan. Then, provide them with coaching and mentoring and help them increase their skills and their sense of competence and accomplishment. Tip #5: Monitor the progress of your employees towards accomplishing their goals and objectives – then provide rewards to reinforce positive behavior, increase their sense of progress and keep them motivated. This can include recognition in front of peers and other rewards that don’t cost a lot of money but are meaningful to the person. Motivating employees to learn, to grow, to try challenging new assignments, and to work together as a team can be incredibly fulfilling. Seeing the look on someone’s face when they’ve succeeded at something they never thought was possible is a gift itself (Quast, 2012). The advice I would offer to Justin Salisbury would be for him as the owner to engage himself with his employees and not just the managers. It is extremely important that as the leader and owner, you show your employees that your goal and or objectives are extremely important, not just to you but for the overall good of the company, and that together you will succeed. Showing that you are part of the team will push them to work harder and stay motivated. Perhaps a pat on the back, a job well done, will go along way, and make one happy and motivated (especially coming from the owner of the company). Salisbury’s recognition program is great for managers. In my opinion I believe both managers and employees deserve an incentive and or recognition program. Other forms of recognition could be to offer gift cards to: restaurants, spas, amusement parks, TV give a ways, luncheons, movie tickets, Management team outings; these are all great incentives for one to receive. Keep in mind, it isn’t always about what you give them, a Thank you and or Job Well Done card can go a long way! Managers and Employees should be rewarded, because without the employees hard work the manager wouldn’t be successful, and without the managers continued support and motivation the employee couldn’t do it alone. It takes a team to fully succeed with always having one who will lead and or manage.