Brands invest a significant amount of time and resources into understanding how consumers feel and what they seek in the overall customer experience. This investment often involves gathering data from multiple sources, channels, and touchpoints in the customer journey. Frontline employees can be an extremely valuable source of true CX insights that can help brands increase the customer return cycle and average customer spend.
Here, we’ll look at a few reasons why your frontline employees are your greatest CX asset, and how the insights they provide can help CX managers seize opportunities to create a more satisfying customer experience in service of driving business growth.
Frontline employees can provide feedback on technology integrations
Digital platforms like mobile apps, self-serve kiosks, order tracking systems, third-party delivery systems, and even AI-assisted interfaces are simply part of the experience consumers expect from brands these days. The challenge, however, is ensuring these various tech platforms actually increase the quality of the customer experience.
A recent SMG survey found that 39% of customers reported difficulties with a brand’s in-store ordering kiosk or tablet. This is where the value of human insight and a boots-on-the-ground perspective from your frontline workers can help CX managers better understand how well—or how poorly—digital technology is working for both the customer and the employee.
Employee experience surveys can provide critical feedback on new technology rollouts, or how the introduction of a new technology could eliminate gaps in product or service quality. An EX platform that evaluates employee satisfaction surveys can help surface these insights and create a stronger link between the EX and CX sides of your business.
Frontline workers can illuminate in-store barriers to a positive customer experience
Creating a great in-store experience for customers takes a lot of work. Store layout, visual merchandising, traffic patterns, restroom layout, and hours of operation all play into how customers feel about stores and whether they’re likely to return to a specific location. A recent report on the restaurant industry found that highly satisfied customers will return to a store 3x sooner compared to less satisfied customers.
Frontline workers will not only be the first source of whether there are in-store barriers to creating highly satisfied customers. They’ll likely be the most valuable, especially if employees feel empowered to report issues to CX managers.
This frontline feedback is extremely valuable to brands working to expand their business and grow their number of locations. It helps brands build better stores by optimizing product placement, improving store navigation, and enhancing the overall in-store customer experience.
Frontline workers can help close gaps in process or product quality
Even as the average consumer’s financial situation stabilizes and inflation continues to level off, consumers are signaling that they’re still not ready to spend. About 38% of consumers say they intend to spend less, even with more stable financials, and 69% say they plan to dine out less as a way to cut unnecessary expenditures.
This makes closing the gaps in process or product quality more important than ever—which, for example, can take the form of reducing the number of menu items or implementing drive-thru displays to help ensure order accuracy.
In each of these instances, frontline employees are likely to be one the more valuable sources of customer feedback. They are the ones who have to facilitate the sale or troubleshooting of products, and, as a result, they’re the primary line of communication with customers.
Using employee satisfaction and engagement surveys to inform your CX data can reveal process bottlenecks and product deficiencies. Taking steps to address these issues not only empowers frontline employees, it also can help boost customer satisfaction scores, increase average customer spend, and generate a stronger sense of customer loyalty.
Bridging the gap between your CX and EX data is the first step in this process, and it’s what makes SMG a true innovator in the experience management space. Learn more about how SMG can help you execute on a connected CX and EX program.
