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With 73% of consumers likely to recommend brands with good loyalty programs, it becomes imperative for customer service agents to create a smooth operating environment for the customers. Customers come up with complaints, dissatisfaction, and disagreements, and the primary agenda of good customer care service is to resolve them timely making this kind of work exhausting. Thus, a good amount of appreciation in the form of awards must be adopted by every company.
According to Accenture, over 90% of companies have placed a loyalty program to motivate employees to feel enthralled in their work. Disengaged employees will provide minimum customer service and won’t go the extra mile to make your customers happy. This can result in decreasing customer service quality and, over time, employee resignation may rise as agents pursue a workplace with a more rewarding position.
Hence, embracing certain best practices to keep your customer care support encouraged is the ideal way to boost revenue. Read on to learn about the best customer service incentive programs and strategies to make your customer care staff happy.
What is a customer service incentive program?
Customer service incentive programs are created to attract, engage, and retain talented and hard-working employees. The agents working and complying with the goals of an organization are bound to get some rewards and benefits to motivate positive behaviors in your company.
These rewards come in many shapes, like tuition reimbursement, more time off, and added flexibility in work placements. It is vital to select employee incentive programs that match the desires and individual staff styles and align with the company’s matters.
Remember, a customer would never contact you if your products/services are running smoothly. No customer would ever have to contact support unless they just wanted to let you know their love for your brand or need to file a complaint.
Besides, the fact is that many customer requests daily come demanding thoughtful handling, sensitivity, and politeness. This class of service is hard to accomplish consistently unless customer service representatives are incentivized for their work.
With a top-notch customer service incentive program, your team is dedicated to working harder and aligning with business objectives.
Customer service incentive programs are a kind of reward for exceptional customer service to patrons. The reward might range from monetary or a gift to verbal recognition of a job nicely done. When customer service representatives are rewarded, their ideal of service enhances as they seek to adjust their behavior to earn their motivation in the form of rewards.
The most suitable customer service incentive programs are devised to identify employees for their assistance to the business and whether they are supporting meeting overall business plans. Incentives should reminisce that customer service is a team sport and prize distribution for employees is a great part of a well-functioning team.
How do customer service incentives benefit employees and employers?
You require customer service incentive programs to boost employee morale and push engagement. Organizations globally recognize the significance of incentives, with the incentives industry rising constantly.
Incentive agendas work because they change human behavior drastically. Research at Cornell University showed that instantaneous rewards augment a sense of encouragement to accomplish a goal. Thus, employees awarded more repeatedly are more motivated to achieve associated tasks.
Besides, organizations that implement customer service incentive programs achieved a 79% success rate in fulfilling their established goals when the reward system was proposed. This implies that your organization ought to move outside just annual years of service awards and entrench employee incentive programs into your day-to-day work.
Furthermore, customer service incentive programs can enrich employee performance by as much as 44% and boost other employees to stay with their company. Companies that utilize concrete sales incentives also notice annual revenue growths that are three times more elevated as compared to counterparts.
Recognition encourages employees and calls center agents to try harder and adopt every possible way to satisfy their customers. Therefore, customer service incentives lead to improved customer service and more pleased, loyal customers that are ready to refer your business.
Customer service incentives policies also represent that you value your service representatives and appreciate them. It’s the correct strategy for businesses that desire to enhance their customer service and become understood in the industry for the finest customer service.
Incentives positively influence your external customer service and internal employee concentration. The implication of motivating your employees cannot be exaggerated, and incentives don’t have to be higher either. So, employees and employers are both in a balanced way and share a healthy bond.
15 Best customer service incentive programs
Customer service incentive programs have enormous benefits, but how to begin the same? Check out some of the best incentive examples that have been verified to engage and uplift employees over the lengthy haul.
1. Giving bonus in the form of paid leave
The best way to respect and appreciate your top-performing customer service representatives is to provide them with an additional paid day off which will deliver real value to the employee. Bonus paid leaves are not technically a monetary reward, but it has powerful and emotional worth to an employee.
The individual can enjoy some additional time away from work with his family. This incentive also has fairly little cost to the company corresponding to how much the employee will relish it.
A complimentary bonus day off work is a suitable reward for all the hard work the individual has been placing in and a prospect for them to recharge themselves.
The next day they will come back to work rejuvenated and prepared to keep leading the direction of assisting more customers to be happy.
2. Choosing the employee of the month
Every month, you need to select the employee that has been determined for delivering outstanding customer service. For this, you can post their photo on a noticeboard to offer recognition.
Also, opt for awards medals or print a certificate to make this competition feel more authorized. An employee of the month winner is something that will count towards promotion activity in the future.
3. Offering words of appreciation
Being a manager, the simplest way to incentivize an employee is to feed verbal praise for a job well done. When given some words of appreciation to an employee for their positive efforts, they will feel valued and more probable to do a better job in the future.
It takes practically no effort and costs but pays rewards in employee morale. Verbal praise has the most influence, particularly when it comes from your manager, and ideally, it should be given in public, so everyone learns what a good job they are accomplishing.
4. Providing free lunch
Yes, offering free meals to your customer service representatives once or twice a week will definitely encourage them to work even harder for your organization.
As a manager, you can arrange some get-together lunch for your team and motivate them to speak up their mind in front of you. This way, you can get hold of their thoughts and feedback. This practice hardly costs the company’s monetary status but will result in employee retention for sure.
5. Giving tickets to any event
Another easy and cost-effective strategy for customer service incentives is to offer them some free tickets to any concert or movie, or entertainment show.
Provide at least 4-5 tickets so that they can enjoy the event with their family. This policy will lead to the contentment of an employee who will work and remove all the hurdles and deliver the best results to the company. You will be amazed to see the next level working situation of that employee who is encouraged with various incentive programs.
6. Any gifts card or gadgets to praise them
Know the top performers of the team and gift them a gift card or any gadget to show them that their work is being noticed by the company. Although offering gadgets and gift cards might be an expense to the company’s accounts, it will lead to an upliftment of revenue in the future surely.
Gadgets like tabs, smartphones, or laptops in order to make their working culture more productive, or give them electronic gift cards like Croma to buy gadgets from. Also, this will make them more inclined to the company, and they will never think of leaving the organization as they have to return the gadgets while resigning.
7. Praising their achievements on Slack
Promoting positive conduct in your customer service team can be made feasible by creating their achievements public.
Save a Slack channel (or any team communication tool) as a place where other team members can emphasize the small wins of their coworkers for everyone to notice.
Name the channel and encourage team members to examine the little things their colleagues have done to enhance team spirit and enlighten a culture of appreciation for the work that everyone accomplishes.
Employees will produce a more positive mindset as they scrutinize for chances to shout out to their associates.
8. Organizing rewards ceremony
Every month or quarterly, organize a rewards ceremony to value your employees. This will hardly make a hole in the company’s accounts but definitely boost customer service representatives. In the hope of getting awards or recognition, the individual will work hard. And after achieving the award, he/she will work even harder for the next reward.
9. Offering flexible working timings
Letting agents select the shifts they work is a splendid incentive for enhancing customer service. Enabling them to pick their shift pattern for a week or a month is a worthwhile reward for your most high-performing employees. Adjustable working gives your customer support the option to enjoy activities they usually would miss out on. Providing your service staff power over their schedules is a wonderful incentive to make them work harder.
10. Hosting a pet-friendly day
Another tip for your top-performing customer care staff is to give them the prospect to bring their precious pet to work for the day. This usually enhances the morale of the entire team, as most people relish having animals in the office. Having a pet in the office is a generous mood booster and makes people desire to be there more.
11. Sponsoring trips after completion of the target
A costly yet effective customer service incentive program is offering your representatives sponsored trips after they have achieved set targets. This may be a costly affair for the company but it will motivate employees to work hard and achieve the targets within the time frame.
12. Host well-rounded meetings
Host 1:1 meetings with your service representatives to provide them with precise feedback concerning how they are functioning and whether they are completing their targets.
Determine areas where they could enhance and show them the aptitudes they require to work on. By giving comprehensive feedback, customer care staff will experience that their contribution actually counts. It provides them with marks to aim for and a standard against which they can measure wins.
13. Designated corners with their names
The simple and effective strategy to boost your employees is designating floors or any corners with their names. They will feel valued and will be happy to work even harder to accomplish this reward.
14. Offering VIP parking
Often, daily parking charges are reimbursed by the company but offering your top performers a VIP or set parking for their vehicles will grow a sense of appreciation in them. They will feel esteemed in the company.
15. Advance their careers
It’s hard for customer care support to remain motivated and productive at work if they don’t have a sense of career progression and an idea of how they might be developing professionally. A good way to encourage employees to stay and reduce the likelihood of agent attrition is to help them focus on their professional development and provide opportunities for growth.
The best approach to learning about how your business can help your customer care support is to talk to them about their future career aspirations. What are their goals, and how can your business enable them to achieve them? It might be by giving them access to training courses, job shadowing, or attending conferences.
Case Study
Here is a case study for your better understanding.
Client
Business Leaders Council is a multi-billion-dollar, full-service community bank with several dozen branches.
Business goal
• Excel bank revenue by rewarding business leaders who referred at least two million dollars in value of the profitable new business
• Encourage key leaders to join and stay active in the business leaders' council
• Build brand ambassadors for the bank within the business community
Solution and results
The bank then builds relationships with business leaders and asks them for referral and in return, offer them trip incentive rewards. For travel incentive rewards, an individual had to be nominated for the Council by a bank’s VP and will be eligible to refer substantial new business and to fully support the bank’s code of ethics.
Also, to be eligible for the travel incentive, a council member was mandated to vigorously refer two million dollars worth of new business during the year.
The trip incentive was a four-day educational and networking event at a luxury resort in Phoenix, Arizona.
Outcomes
Over the past four years, the business leader council has provided over $250,000,000 in new business/sealed referrals. And the ROI was outstanding; the bank realized an $8.3 million return on a $1 million acquisition.
Wrapping up
No company can succeed without supplying an increased customer service bar that makes customers happy, loyal, and feel good to be a part of your business. It is also critical to hire highly-skilled customer care staff and create an environment by offering various customer service incentive programs to make them motivated.
Top-quality customer care support will only adhere around if you incentivize them in a proper manner. They want to feel their actions are recognized, and they are a useful part of a team. Incentives support you in drawing and keeping top talent who will be instrumental in allowing you to deliver customer service that puts you apart from your counterparts.
Your customer service team evolves a well-oiled machine that provides an outstanding customer experience every time. Hence, make them feel valued and satisfied.
FAQs
Here are answers to some frequently asked questions for your help.
Q. Who is entitled to the customer service incentive program?
The design of your incentives will be affected by whether you want to divide the reward amongst a team or reward only a single person. Then choose the top performer of the team and reward them as per your rules.
Q. How to find the top performers in the organization?
For this, set certain targets and achievements if any of the employees are able to achieve those targets within the time frame. Reward them accordingly and motivate them to work even harder.
Q. When to offer incentives to your employee?
This thinking relies on how your customer care support decides to be incentivized. Maybe they prefer to focus on short wins where an everyday rewards system would fit them best, or they might want to postpone to quarterly reviews to obtain their incentives. The most promising way to decide the rhythm of your incentives is to question your employees and act based on their answers.
Q. On what grounds are incentives provided?
If you are working remotely, you may require to offer online-only-based incentives. A good option for online-only is mailing paper rewards in the mail, such as a handwritten letter and a gift card. Whatever you decide, make sure it’s suitable for your customer care support’s hard work.
