Wouldn’t it be great if you could increase your customer retention while also improving your employee retention and engagement? Defining who you are as a company is a great way to do this, but you can also accomplish it by taking your company culture and using it to define overall goals. Ask your employees how they can help your ultimate goals will help them understand the value of their work, and improve client relations.
Employee Engagement
You can keep employees engaged by giving them a driving force behind their actions. Lay down an end goal and get them more motivated, out of clutter tasks, and into their work (for the long term!).
Goals Are Great Driving Forces
Employee engagement is a great way to get more out of your employees, and putting a very clear why-you-work behind their actions engages them with your company. Goals give them the why. Zappos is behind great customer service, Apple is about innovation, putting down the end goal for all your employees helps guide their actions.
For example, if you made really fabulous hats that look good on people, letting your employees know that end goal will help them. They can know 1. On the phone, it isn’t about the sale, it about finding what’s best for the customer 2. In the factory, it’s about making quality, and 3. That information about how to style and look best in their really fashionable hat is something that can be passed along with the purchase or after. Goals guide employees and put a driving force behind their actions. That’s really important if you want to use your awesome employees to be a hyper-growth company.
These overarching goals do differ from company culture. For example, the quality focused employee in the factory might have a different goal, to make a ton of hats and increase output. The company culture might dictate client facing excellence, but that employee isn’t part of that as a goal.
Clear the Clutter
Mindless work, tedious tasks, and large projects can easily get tied up in the details if there isn’t a driving goal. The color of your marketing pamphlet is a hard endless question if it isn’t driven by the follow-up, “what will the client like?”. There are mountains of marketing data available that can help you answer the second question, but without the focus, you can find yourself and your employees lost in the clutter of small tasks. Clear the clutter with the overarching goals that outline what you are doing, what you want to accomplish.
Employee Retention
Engaged employees who know what they are doing, why they are doing what they are doing, and why it matters are more likely to stay. Goals are a great way to move beyond basic company culture and outline a direction to head in. If you’ve got confidence in what you deliver, you can even put it in front of the client. Uber did just that by outlining what they want to deliver to business, what their drivers can expect as an employee, and what people can expect as users. Transparency is great because it lays out what all parties can expect, they know what Uber wants to do internally, what they want to deliver, and how it should happen.
Client Retention: How?
Better Work
You have clients and unless you’re a hospital, you probably want to keep them. When your employees put out better quality and quantity of work, your clients like you more, and will stick around a little longer. If you’re doing good things for your clients, putting out more work and being able to explain the greater benefits of your work will keep more clients. Better work=better retention.
Better Message
Besides delivering better work, organizational goals will help you explain what you’re doing for your clients a little better. It’s easy to explain with work, you did x,y, and z for them, but it’s better to explain what x, y, and z are doing for them. For example, if you’re a hat salesman, it’s fine it tell your customers that you delivered them a hat, on time and with some information on how to wear it. But it’s much better to go short. Go direct. Go to the overall message.
We make you look fashionable by using great hats.
Tag lines are listened to more than fat reports. You can give your clients access to these messages in taglines, at events, or in any sort of online marketing ploy. That means putting your message into social events with your client to make it more you, reiterating your tagline in physical advertising, and letting your work expand on that tagline. Give your clients an easy way to understand who you are, and what you are doing for them with great, to the point, goals. A great book to read if you need help is Writing Without Bullshit. It’s a quick read, and can help you eliminate bullshit from your goals, taglines, and emails.
Great goals will give your employees a driving force behind their actions, engage them, and help them get more done. That productivity helps you keep clients. You can also use goals to define what you do for clients in a clear and concise way. Better performing employees, higher retention ratings, and more clients are a wonderful result from clear goals. Give yourself some #goals and see where it can take your company.
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