Did you know that you may be considered a “customer” by the company you work for? Or that you may be responsible for serving customers even if you don’t have a customer-facing position? The truth of the matter is every internal department that provides services to other departments is considered to have “internal customers.” This can include the helpdesk, for instance, or the copy center, human resources and maintenance, to name a few.
And, like relationships with external customers, relationships with internal customers need to be tracked, measured and improved upon. In our recent post, Best Practices for Gauging Employee Engagement, we talked about how to use multi-channel call center solutions to measure engagement between the company and its customer-facing employees.
Now, we’ll talk about how a company should go about measuring the engagement of employees who interact with internal customers. The short answer: the same way it does with its external-customer-facing employees, for example: short, post-project-completion surveys; focus groups; and longer annual surveys. To take this one step further, you should survey advanced, all-in-one call center solutions.
Focusing on improving engagement for employees with internal customers is about achieving soft metrics, such as company morale and creating a healthier work environment. Also, awareness of these metrics among the employees being measured can serve to remind them that their co-workers are their customers, ensuring that those internal customers are treated with the same courtesy given external customers.
Paralleling the two paths ensures that both are aligned toward the same company goals. For instance, windshield repair and replacement company Safelite AutoGlass measures both sets of employees using a Net Promoter Score.
Today’s array of powerful call center solutions can provide a variety of communication options for increasing employee engagement, including social media, chat and video. They can even help support managers’ incentive initiatives for employees by rewarding staff members who reach survey milestones or achieve superior results. Managers can also easily share everything online, from a simple digital badge to a congratulatory photo to training points.
As you look to measure and improve your employees’ engagement with the company, keep the end-goal in mind: whether they are on the giving or receiving end, increased satisfaction and productivity is good for the bottom line.
