From customer satisfaction to employee motivation to customer satisfaction — what a tremendous cycle. Satisfied customers motivate employees. It’s a chain reaction of contagious enthusiasm.

You may have been to Webers Restaurant on Highway 11 near Orillia, Ontario. Mobs of people wait for their charbroiled burgers and fresh cut fries, which might seem like ordinary food, but it’s the service that is ‘extra-ordinary’. The staff has fun, singing and joking around, and maintain their drive to create happy customers. The laughter and applause from the customers is spontaneous positive feedback that inspires the workers to keep working to make customers happy. Good customer service has a compound effect; thus the chain reaction is created, from customer satisfaction to employee motivation. The personal satisfaction that employees derive from delighting customers makes it almost impossible for them to be cynical or unmotivated about their workplace.

I am sure that many of you also have very satisfied customers. The key here is bridging the gap with customer feedback. Are your customers giving you feedback? Furthermore, are you allowing the feedback to reach the employees? The role of managers and business owners in this process is to develop ways to make positive feedback as motivational for employees as possible. These types of comments are harvested through surveys, online form submissions, inquiries and feedback from the general public.

You can spend a fortune bringing customers in the front door, only to have them exiting through the back door unsatisfied with their experience. Most businesses begin their existence with a strong and well-defined purpose of benefiting the customer in some way, but over time a variety of factors contribute to diluting that purpose. Factors include a concern for profitability and sales volume, ego, and office politics. The best way to increase your bottom line is to focus on the reason you got in to business in the first place – which was hopefully to serve a customer need.

Empower your staff to delight their customers and allow your staff to reap the glory of customer delight by cycling feedback to them. This is a continuous, time-released motivator which creates a win / win / win situation for all involved.

The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little ‘extra’.

Best wishes for extraordinary customer service.

Penny