Think about the last time you received great customer service.
Maybe it was from your local barista who remembered your coffee order. Maybe it was a staff member at a grocery store who helped you find a few items on your shopping list. Maybe it was that lady behind the counter who was nice and non-judgemental when you bought 15 household plants in one go last week.
The point is, good customer service goes a long way. And it’s a powerful asset for businesses. In the US, 65% of people find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising. Of a group of 15,000 people that participated in a global study on customer experience, run by PwC, a resounding 73% of people worldwide rank customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.
Good customer service comes down to good teamwork. And a customer service team is no more or less important than any other team within a business – it’s just the one that’s most visible to the outside world.
Therefore, the challenge facing businesses is to facilitate better teamwork all the way up the chain, from bottom-up and cross-collaboratively. With email as the brand ambassador for old-school, top-down communication, many companies have wised up to the fact that enterprise social collaboration tools are the way to make real teamwork flourish. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, 72% of companies use social tools to achieve their full potential when it comes to innovation and efficiency through highly collaborative teams.
Workplace from Meta is one such collaboration tool. Its mission is to turn companies into communities. With all the familiar features of Facebook, Workplace is a mobile-friendly platform that is just as accessible to corporate teams working in an office as it is to frontline staff, like that barista who remembered your coffee order.
What’s interesting is the impact tools like Workplace can have on fundamental work processes – in this case, on teamwork. Global research firm Forrester Consulting recently conducted a study into the Total Economic Impact of Workplace from Meta, involving over 200 companies that use the platform. On average, they reported a 20% increase in task efficiency for frontline workers and 20% faster decision making with Workplace.
What’s more, these companies also reported a 3.9 x return on investment in Workplace over a 3 year period as well as $13.1 million in quantified benefits over 3 years. Hard proof of the fact that empowering people with the right tools and paving the way for more efficient teamwork has tangible benefits to the bottom line.
As for defining what better teamwork looks like, a survey of 14,000 people conducted by Microsoft last year has some answers. The survey results showed that for Baby Boomers right through to Gen Z, meetings in person are ranked amongst the top two choices as the most preferred mode of collaboration. It also revealed an increasing trend in the popularity of chat, with Gen Z rating chat as their first choice when it comes to collaboration tools at work.
From adopting next-gen social enterprise platforms, to making more time for face-to-face meetings, businesses need to fuel better teamwork. So that they can find better solutions to shared problems, hear better ideas from more people in the business, and deliver a better customer experience. Even for the customers who just buy truckloads of household plants.
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, check out ‘Quantifying the Real Value of Better Communication‘.
