This year, National Customer Service Week runs from Monday 7th October through to Friday the 11th October. This is an ideal time to celebrate your customer service representatives, encourage them in their work, and put the spotlight back on delivering a high-quality experience to your customers.
This is also a great time to review your ongoing efforts to engage your customer service team continually, through formal and measurable employee recognition and employee incentive programs. In reality, every day should be a recognition day for customer service representatives. Catching the positive small things and celebrating those moments with everyone.
Celebrating National Customer Service Week will:
- Improve morale and motivation throughout your business
- Reward and highlight excellent customer service
- Remind customers of your commitment to them
- Focus employees’ attention on the importance of customer service
5 Ways You Can Celebrate Great Customer Service
Any recognition, whether it’s a paid reward, extra time off, or a simple ‘thank you,’ sends a powerful message to employees that their efforts matter. It raises morale, encourages future efforts, and increases job satisfaction.
Below are five ways you can celebrate this October:
1. Recognize Employees in a Public Way
Recognizing employees that have made an exceptional contribution to customer service is doubly powerful when you do it in front of their peers. There’s plenty of ways to do this, from a full-blown awards evening with music and entertainment laid on, to a simple mention and congratulations at your weekly team meeting.
Both can be effective, but if you’d really like to make an impact, host an event. This is powerful for three reasons:
· It highlights your company’s commitment to customer service
· It rewards all employees who attend by providing an enjoyable evening
· It provides real recognition for employees that have performed particularly well
The event can also serve an educational purpose. Consider including a talk from a member of your leadership, or – better yet – a guest speaker.
2. Give Meaningful Rewards
Employees rewards are a great way to recognize service and improve morale. Simple cash rewards are good, but they don’t last – employees typically use them for everyday expenses. Instead, consider using more creative rewards, which can be just as effective:
- Extra vacation days
- Work from home opportunities
- Access to an improved parking spot
- Physical gifts
- Trips
Remember: what is valuable to one employee may not be valuable to another, especially if they come from different generations. You might want to provide a range of potential rewards and then let the employee choose which they’d prefer. This allows you to ensure that each employee gets something meaningful to them.
3. Involve Your Customers
Customer Service Week should be about your customers – so involve them! There’s a couple of ways you can do this:
Why not ask your customers for great stories of customer service? This will:
- Help you choose which employees get rewarded
- Create valuable collateral for your future marketing efforts
- Remind customers of the customer service you provide them
Another idea is to call your highest value customers to thank them for their business. Ring them, thank them, and ask if there’s anything you can do to improve their experience. This is a nice touch that reminds both your employees and your customers about the value of customer service. Your customers will appreciate it even if they don’t need any further help.
4. Showcase Customer Stories
Those customer stories you’ve been collecting? Now’s the time to share them. This reminds your staff what a difference it makes to customers when they do their job well.
Get creative with how you share these stories – a simple email is good, but there’s plenty more you can do. Share stories in meetings, create posters and put them up in your business, or even put slides or videos on digital display boards you use. You can also share these stories on your website to show other customers how you are dedicated to customer service.
5. Celebrate With Food
Let’s face it: most people love food, and it’s a great way to celebrate any occasion – including Customer Service Week. Free cakes and donuts are great, but why not treat your customer service representatives to breakfast, or take them out for a meal in the evening?
Shared events like meals not only help celebrate special events, but they also aid team cohesiveness and morale. Like putting on a rewards evening, a meal is both meaningful and memorable.
Are You Still Celebrating Customer Performance The Hard Way?
Customer Service Week is a great opportunity to increase engagement and morale, but it shouldn’t end there. Weekly events should be just one part of an overall performance recognition strategy that encourages employees throughout the year.
This doesn’t have to be a lot of work. Here at CoreCentive, we’ve dedicated our careers to helping businesses recognize and reward their employee’s contributions. We help businesses build a culture of recognition through our comprehensive suite of recognition and incentive solutions.
These include:
- Service award programs
- Points-based programs
- Performance- based programs
- Sales incentives
These systems help your business to increase employee retention, improve engagement, and inspire your customer service representatives (and your other employees) to perform better.
