Staffing Robot - Web design and marketing services for companies in the staffing industry

Hively Closed Loop Customer Feedback and Employee Rewards

Staffing companies that measure customer feedback and reward employees for delivering outstanding customer service can gain a competitive edge and boost their bottom lines. These companies will see greater customer loyalty, less employee turnover and improved morale.

Hively is the first web based system that offers you a complete ‘closed loop’ feedback system from customer to employee. Our goal with Hively is to create the simplest way for companies to gather and measure customer feedback, and reward their employees for providing exceptional customer service. The diagram below is our way of visually explaining how this process works.

Sign up for Hively today and see the benefits for yourself!

How Staffing Agencies Can Reward Employees For Exceptional Customer Service

Customer service is the key to success for almost every business - especially when it comes to staffing agencies. Your employees spend hours every day talking to your customers and candidates. Their interactions can make a huge difference in your customer satisfaction and ultimately your bottom line. 

Measuring customer happiness for your staffing company is critical. However, motivating your employees to provide great customer service is also something you should should focus on. If you're like a lot of companies though, it can be difficult and time consuming to know where to get started with all of this.

Look no further! Today we are happy to announce the simplest way to instantly motivate and reward your top performing employees for providing exceptional customer service. Introduction Kudos - a new feature in Hively!

What are Kudos?

Kudos are a simple way for employees to give each other feedback or for managers to reward employees. Think of it like a ‘thanks’ or a ‘pat on the back.’ 

Just like with Hively customer feedback, if you receive a Kudo you will be instantly notified and have the Hively Kudos badge prominently displayed on your leaderboard profile for your team to see. You will also receive +1 count for each Kudo you receive. Kudos are separated from customer feedback and don’t effect your customer happiness scores.

But we didn’t stop there!

What’s better than getting a Kudo? Getting a Kudo with a gift card reward! We recently partnered with Tango Card to enable our customers to provide real time rewards to top performing employees. Tango Card provides virtual gift cards that can be redeemed for cash or other gift cards like Amazon, Starbucks, Nike and Zappos. If you’re a Hively team member, simply sign up with Tango Card and you can start adding gift cards to any Kudos you send your team members.

To learn more about the other great features we released in Hively today check out the full announcement here and let your staffing company get started with rewarding your employees! Sign up for Hively. It's free to try!

 

Why WOWing Your Customers Matters

What does it mean to 'WOW' your customers? That's a good question that can have many answers. Essentially, WOWing your customers comes down to doing the unexpected. It means going above and beyond and exceeding customer expectations. It doesn't necessarily have to be a big thing and it doesn't have to cost money. It's whatever you can do to make your customer stop and say WOW!

I remember a big WOW moment we had this year. We had recently moved to a new hosting company called Media Temple and we ran into an issue trying to configure one of our servers. We sent in a support request to Media Temple. Even though we were completely stuck and needed this issue resolved, we assumed we'd have to wait until the morning for an answer, as it was after 10pm. That was not the case. Media Temple responded within a few minutes. However, they didn't just answer our question, they went ahead and completed the configure change for us and gave us the script they had used to do so. Problem solved. Expectations exceeded. WOW!

Another WOW experience I had recently was with BOOQ. BOOQ makes exceptional quality backpacks and other carrying bags. Within the first two months of owning my bag one of the seams on the strap ripped. Although they guarantee their bags I was still prepared for somewhat of a hassle in getting a replacement when I emailed their customer support. That was not the case. BOOQ simply asked for my address and a copy of my receipt. When I provided both they sent me a new pack, no questions that. In addition, the bag I purchased was now out of date so they sent me the new version. WOW!

Both of these instances we're relatively small gestures toward customer happiness. However, they both had the same effect - they have me as a customer for life. Now, anytime someone asks me for a web hosting recommendation I introduce them to Media Temple. Whenever someone asks about where to get a great new carrying bag - I link them to BOOQ.

I've personally worked for companies in the past that would have seen both of these customer service examples as being too costly in terms of time and real dollars. However, companies like BOOQ and Media Temple obviously know the value of providing exceptional customer service. This type of customer service focus mentality has to be a part of the entire company culture. It has to be started and promoted by the owners and executives, and believed and practiced by every employee.

The great thing about all of this is that making your customers happy makes your employees happy. There is no greater feeling than knowing the service you provided solved someone's problem or made someone happy. Empowering your employees to WOW your customers and instilling in them the virtues of doing so, will pay off in big returns for any business.

More and more companies are embracing this belief and implementing systems to give employees immediate feedback about how they have WOW'd their customers, or how they can improve their service and WOW them in the future. Giving your employees the chance to make a real difference in the day to day activities of their customers is one of the greatest investments you can make in the personal growth of your employees, and your business as a whole.  

Hively Upgrade: The 'WOW' Release

We're very excited to reveal the new version of Hively we have titled the 'WOW' Release. This release was almost completely based on customer feedback (thank you so much!). Read on to learn about all the improvements and new features now available in Hively.

First, the 'WOW'

What's a WOW? You know those times you go the extra mile for a customer? Well now they can let you know. Hively has always let your customers indicate if they are Happy, Satisfied or Unhappy. However, now they can also let you know when you have WOW'd them! If you go above and beyond for a customer they can give you a WOW and provide specific reasons for how you WOW'd them.

As with all Hively customer feedback, if you receive a WOW you will be instantly notified and have the Hively WOW badge prominently displayed on your leaderboard profile for your team to see. You will also receive +1 point for a WOW, increasing your personal and team customer satisfaction score! So get out there and start WOWing your customers!

Call-to-Action Buttons

Now, in addition to thanking a customer for leaving you feedback, you can create custom call-to-action buttons. For each button you can choose a label and provide a link (URL) the button will direct to. For example, you could create a button leading customers to a landing page, YouTube video, survey or to send you an email. You can create a different set of call-to-action buttons based on the type of rating the customer leaves you (Happy, Satisfied, Unhappy).

Custom Messages and Redesigned Customer Rating Page. Hively now enables you to customize the message a customer sees once they provide you with a rating. Each message can be customized based on the rating the customer provides.

We've also improved the speed and workflow of the customer rating page to better encourage customers to leave comments, and you now have the option of deciding if customers can you leave you anonymous feedback. This page is also fully optimized for smart phones!

 

Improved Application Integrations with Salesforce.com, Zendesk and Desk

You can now get custom URLs and rating snippets to integrate more seamlessly with your Salesforce.com, Zendeks and Desk.com accounts. This way, your custom email templates in these accounts can identify individual team members in Hively that ratings get sent to. There are more applications we will be adding soon. If there's a specific application you'd like us to add just let us know!

Thanks to all the customers that provided us with feedback to help make this release. There are many other updates inside of Hively as well but we'll let you have some fun discovering them instead of listing them all out here. Let us know what you think of the new improvements to Hively. As always, if you would like to send us feedback or give us your feature ideas we're always ready to listen.    

How is your staffing company measuring customer feedback? Learn more about Hively.

 

5 Tips for Using Customer Feedback to Change Company Behavior

Check out our guest blog post on Prophecy Healthcare's Blog - 5 Tips for Using Customer Feedback to Change Company Behavior.

Knowing when and how to properly gather customer feedback is imperative for any successful business. However, acting on this feedback and using it to influence your company internally is even more important. Properly implementing a closed loop feedback system can dramatically improve every aspect of your company from the products you sell, to how you sell them, to your entire company culture.

Prophecy is an online testing solution, compiling three assessment tools, delivering the most comprehensive employment predictor for the Healthcare Industry. Learn more about Prophecy Healthcare.

New York Times Article: When Businesses Can’t Stop Asking, ‘How Am I Doing?’

Last week it was great to read an article in The New York Times about customer satisfaction surveys. The article discusses how companies are bombarding their customers with surveys in an effort to gauge customer satisfaction. However, it's actually having the opposite effect as response rates are dropping dramatically.

The frequent requests to fill out these surveys, especially with no incentives, have been so annoying that people just stop doing it,” said Richard L. Oliver.

We've blogged on this topic many times. It's critical that every company measure their customer satisfaction. However, asking your customers to constantly fill out lengthy surveys is not the way to do it. It's much easier and more effective to simply provide a method where customers can provide you with instant feedback at their convenience - and do so without having to fill out a time consuming survey. Be sure to also check out the blog by Kimberly Nasief the article mentions. Her blog is called The Service Witch and she blogs about effectively measuring customer satisfaction. One of her posts is titled: Infant Who Begins Babies R Us Customer Satisfaction Survey Dies of Old Age. Learn more about measuring customer satisfaction without surveys here.    

What Customers Are Saying About Hively

Over the last couple of months it's been great to work with and get feedback from so many new customers. It's your insight and feedback that helps drive what we deliver in Hively. Our goal with Hively is to build a simple, yet incredibly useful application for gathering customer feedback, measuring customer happiness and rewarding your team members. The more feedback on how we can do this the better.

We've dedicated a page on the Hively website to post some quotes from our customers about what they think of Hively. Give it a look and see for yourself what people are saying. If you have feedback you'd like to give us or feel like giving us a quote to post for you on this page you can contact us anytime and let us know.

Working with Hively is great. They do a great job of not only promoting good customer service, but of actually practicing it too!

- Jeanenne Kinnetz, Grapetree Medical Staffing

 

Customer Feedback Helps Your Employees Be Successful

Blog post by Staffing Robot Founder, Jason Lander. This post originally appeared on Monster's Blog - MonsterThinking.

One of the best investments you can make as a manager, executive, or business owner is in making your employees successful. Companies focused on making their employees happy and successful are more innovative, productive and create exceptional customer experiences. Put simply, happy employees make happy customers.

A sure way to make your employees successful is to provide them with consistent, direct and real time feedback. It's also a great way to reinforce a culture of excellent customer service and keep your employees engaged. Here are some tips on how to make your employees successful through direct customer feedback:

Real time feedback. There's no greater measure of employee performance than knowing what your customers think of the service they're getting from your employees. The best way to measure customer satisfaction of your employee performance is to implement a mechanism that allows for real time feedback. Real time feedback helps your employees measure their day to day performance and adapt their behaviors by quickly identifying what works and where they can improve.

Direct feedback. One of the best ways to insure customer feedback truly resonates with employees is to let them directly hear the actual voice of the customer, not just a filtered interpretation or statistical summary. Receiving direct customer feedback lets your employees fully absorb the satisfaction level of the customer and helps create real changes in behavior without much additional coaching or direction required.

Internal feedback. In many companies, your employees interact with each other more than they do with customers. Therefore, it's a good idea to let your employees give feedback on other members of your team. As a manager, this lets you see how team members are working together to accomplish their goals and gives you an overall sense of morale. Internal employee feedback will help you gain valuable insight into positive employee interactions and potential issues you simply would have missed otherwise.

Transparent feedback. Don't keep customer feedback (good or bad) hidden. Feedback should be transparent throughout an organization so everyone knows what's happening. Imagine playing a sport and trying to get the most out of your team members without telling them the score. Company wide transparency reinforces learning and lets everyone discover which teams need improvement and which teams are demonstrating best practices. 

 

Sharing feedback. Share positive feedback quickly with your entire company. This supports an environment of continuous focus on delivering excellent customer service and keeping your employees engaged. Further, broadcasting compliments received by team members is a great way to give ongoing kudos to employees and encourage others to work for similar feedback.

Learning from feedback. The main objective of gathering employee feedback is to learn from it. Taking time to analyze feedback and learn from it supports coaching, action and continuous improvement for your employees. When employees know how they are doing and how their work is being seen by customers and other employees they perform at a higher level.

Acting on feedback. Feedback is only useful if it's actionable and you do in fact take action. Be sure to follow up with customers on every issue - no matter the size. By creating a closed feedback loop your customers will know you truly care about their needs and that they can bring any issue to you for resolution. This will greatly increase customer engagement and happiness.

By measuring your employee performance and keeping them in the loop of customer feedback you'll have a much happier and more successful workforce. The key is to provide them with feedback in a way that is consistent, meaningful and actionable. If you haven't adopted a process of direct customer feedback for your employees, today is a great time to get started. Your employees and customers will thank you for it.

Blog post by Staffing Robot Founder, Jason Lander. This post originally appeared on Monster's Blog -MonsterThinking.