Organizations are spending billions of dollars on digital transformation projects, motivated in large part by the need to incorporate tech innovations from the last few years. International Data Corporation (IDC) is projecting that businesses will spend $1.25 trillion on digital transformation in 2019, up from $1.07 trillion in 2018. One of the top drivers of these large investments is improving the customer experience.
AI chatbots, intuitive app interfaces, and trendy websites go a long way to positively impact customers. However, without a team of engaged employees, businesses are held back from achieving a significant return on their digital transformation investments. As the author of this Business2Community.com article explained, “Engaged employees directly affect the experience of the customer, and very often the first impression of a potential customer.”
If you want to see your Net Promoter Score and profits grow, you should allocate a portion of your digital transformation budget to a data-driven employee monitoring solution that will facilitate the improvement of engagement across your entire team. Below, take a look at how employee monitoring software can deliver the tools and metrics you need to enhance customer interactions at the root level of your organization.
Assess Employee Engagement
Similar to visiting a doctor for a check-up, businesses need a complete analysis of their operations to identify symptoms of disengaged employees. For the longest time, HR managers have used employee engagement surveys to check the pulse of the organization. The problem with surveys is, you end up with biased and skewed data. Employees may not always answer questions honestly for fear of retaliation.
Employee & User Activity Monitoring solves the problem by collecting data without direct user input. Oftentimes, when a monitoring system is first incorporated into an organization, managers will have their first comprehensive understanding of employees’ engagement. It’s likely very different from what their survey results have previously shown.
Improving engagement requires an understanding of how the organization operates. Before you can boost engagement, you have to know exactly what’s working and what can be improved. Most employee monitoring solutions measure employee engagement with a user behavior tracking agent. Typically, the agent records computer activity (websites visited, application engagement, etc) and then presents all sorts of insights. Employee activity data reveals how much time users spend – or don’t spend – on work-related applications and websites. Teams can then use the employee data collected to establish a user baseline, which then becomes the control for comparing engagement experiments.
Improve Employee Engagement
With a clear understanding of what “normal” is for your organization, you’ll be able to identify many indicators of disconnected employees. You may find that there are more detached employees than you suspected. Imagine how many customers have had a lackluster experience with your organization because so many employees are disengaged!
The good news is, disengaged employees can become re-engaged; but you probably need adjustments to management or operations strategies. How will you know if your adjustments work? That’s where employee monitoring software comes into play. Ask questions, make informed decisions and then track productivity and engagement to see how effective your changes were. Does the layout of the office impact employee productivity? Will separating talkative coworkers result in higher or lower quality customer service calls? What happens to the office activity when the thermostat is adjusted? With user activity monitoring software, you have the data necessary to accurately track how internal and external factors impact team engagement.
Measure and Enhance Customer Interactions
There’s more to employee monitoring than tracking engagement. Since the software collects all activity data, you can calculate time spent in any number of customer service tools down to the second. Customers want their issues dealt with quickly and with minimal friction. With an accurate account of activity durations and workflows, you can identify clunky utilities and excessive process steps.
Ship Sticks, a company that ships golf clubs for golfers when they travel, uses activity monitoring to reveal trends and identify inefficient workflows in internal tool usage. They utilize ActivTrak’s employee monitoring software to eliminate extra clicks and lag time within their customer service systems. The benefits are two-fold. First, Ship Sticks’ Customer Service Representatives (CSR) have more time to serve other customers. Second, customers don’t have to sit on the phone in awkward silence while the CSR waits for an application to load. Their story is a perfect example of how employee monitoring can be used to track customer interactions and help management spur on improved customer response times.
This is only one example of the business value captured by employee monitoring data. You can multiply your ROI by taking advantage of other uses for employee monitoring as well. Get some ideas from our Beginner’s Guide to Employee Monitoring or use the insights inside the guide to come up with your own use cases!
