The post-pandemic customer has far higher demands for the customer experience. We argue that the best way to meet those expectations is to give more power to the frontline staff, the one true link between your brand and your customers.

Reading time: About 5 minutes

Key takeaways

  • The post pandemic customer has higher demands
  • To meet those demands you should focus on the frontline staff
  • Create true motivation instead of hollow words
  • True motivation is built upon autonomy

Customer experience is crucial to revenue. At Maze, we’ve witnessed time and time again that when our clients give more power to their frontline staff, and track in-store frontline performance, customer satisfaction goes up. And revenue follows.

The connection between revenue and satisfaction

There are many connections between customer satisfaction and revenue, and three of them are loyalty, footfall and recommendations. Survicate wrote about customer satisfaction, and claimed that it’s “5 to 25 times more valuable to keep your customers than acquire new ones”. At the same time, our own data at Maze suggest that prior positive in-store experience is 3 to 10 times more important than advertising to ensure footfall to your store.  Also, according to Zippia, the average customer tells six people about a good customer experience. All of these factors have a great impact on sales, and revenue.

But to reach high levels of customer satisfaction, you need true motivation. You can’t just tell the frontline team what to do. The team has to feel eager to do it. The motivation should come from the inside, not the outside.

The secret behind true motivation

Steve Rose, PhD and academic researcher, described that motivation works “through a dopaminergic neural process whereby our brains reward us when we carry out a task that meets our internal human need for a sense of autonomy, competence, relatedness, or basic survival needs such as food, safety, or relief from pain.”

It’s the “autonomy” and “competence” parts that are interesting to us. When you let your frontline staff take ownership and responsibility for the customer experience, with autonomy, their motivation will improve. As it does, so does the customer satisfaction. The process itself is organic, and lives on its own without external forces.

Think about it. How many times do you think your customers will meet your CEO? Or your CMO? Or any “C” or “O”? Probably never. The most direct link you will ever have to your customers is the frontline staff. That is where the customer experience is created. Not in a boardroom, or in meetings, or in excel. So let your frontline team have the power.

We hope to see you at Retail Week Live in London in March. There you can listen to Espen Karlsen, CEO of Jernia, who will talk more about “Game-changing customer experience in a post-pandemic world”. And much more. Check out this site for more information about everything we have planned for the event.



Sources
Survocate


Zippia


Steve Rose