Author: Danilo Espinal

With such vast competition in and outside of the workplace, capturing the recognition of your boss is no easy task. Whether your goal is to be the highest respected CEO of a modern tech company or the most proficient shop-floor worker, these five steps will help you pave the way to becoming a superstar employee.

Hard Skills – Technical Competencies

From database management to comprehensive UX design, hard skills relate to the technical competencies necessary to fulfill your job role, and these are gained through education and training. The particular set of hard skills that you embody is what makes you so unique and necessary to the business. Conversely, if you lack in this department, it could be a restrictive factor in earning the boss’ approval.

How do you gain further hard skills? You learn. You put yourself out there. You grab your line manager for a one-on-one to express your desire to advance your strengths. In such a digitally-dense world, there are numerous online courses you can employ to strengthen your technical skillset.

Soft Skills – Personality Competencies

Soft skills are defined as your personality traits. These competencies are developed from the moment you are born. While life is a major influence in how soft skills are refined and improved by the individual’s journey, it is possible to learn and advance in those that will set you aside as a star employee.

Emotional intelligence, communication, taking ownership, actively listening, patience, and creativity are a few examples of soft skills represented in a superstar employee. There are ways you can build on your soft skills, such as public speaking courses, emphasizing your willingness to learn, and proving yourself to be an adaptable worker.

Perfect Your Personal Approach

The ‘no-drama’ workplace ethos favors those with the capacity to separate from their emotions. It comes with no surprise that perfecting your approach, i.e. your ability to monitor and hinder your emotions and separate your professional and personal personas, is a major step to becoming a key employee. As such, those who provide clarity, consistency, confidence, and of course, patience through their work are seen as the most productive and proficient employees.

This doesn’t come naturally to some – there are many industries where your thoughts and feelings are the unique factors that ensure you stand out (such as in artistic and creative fields). However, for the sake of professionalism, might we suggest screaming into a pillow in the comfort of your own home to deter an onslaught of temper tantrums and emotional whirlwinds from the workplace?

Demonstrate Your Values

With such ubiquitous terms in 2020 as ‘well-being’ and ‘company culture’, employers and employees form an unspoken alliance to create a happy workplace based on strong mutual values. Therefore, to be a superstar employee, you should ascertain how your values and those of the business align.

To stand out from the pool of colleagues, demonstrate your commitment to supporting the company values by blending them with your own. For the customer service assistant in the clothing store, dress to impress in a fresh, fully-branded outfit that represents the cool, aesthetic vibe of the business. For the social marketer for an agency new on the scene, reiterate the company’s innovative flair through your own bold, enticing, and daring campaign approach.

Likewise, your collection of values is what makes you distinctive as a star worker. Taking ownership of your values, morals and emotional intelligence will set you aside as a devoted, committed, and responsible individual. Maintain a parallel between your needs with those of the company. Taking a five-minute breather isn’t bunking off from work, but is resetting your brain to give the best you can.

Reshuffle Your Habits

Your workplace habits are intrinsic to how valued you are as a superstar employee. For example, if you take two hours to settle in for the day, taking time to grab a coffee and setting up your desktop, you won’t be recognized for time-management, nor efficiency. Instead, demonstrate your autonomous and resourceful nature to show how habitually harmonious you are in the workplace.

There is a growing preference for employees who own the attitude to approach their workload with task-by-task fluidity. While many believe multitasking is the way forward for engaging our brains, others reject this ideology. Arguably, it detracts from our ability to accomplish goals in a timely and quality manner, shifting our focus in many directions and not allowing us to wield our best.

As A Superstar Employee… …You will embody both strong personal and professional values. You are sharp, emotionally-aware, and have the capacity to face the workplace environment with calmness, poise, and motivation. Both your soft and hard skills, while refined and advanced, will have constant address through your willingness to grow and learn. You will tackle your workday with regularity and self-control. Also, you can monitor your well-being and patience in a way that ensures productivity and zealousness are always sustained.

Depending on your industry, acquiring a new customer can be anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining one, but that’s just one reason why customer care should be center-focus in your business strategy.

After all, with more company’s offer instant chatbot assistance, extended live chat assistance, and even social media care through Twitter and other platforms, customers have much higher expectations when it comes to customer care these days.

These five tips will help you make sure you’re giving them the best possible care you can, all while promoting satisfied customers and driving loyalty in the process.

#1 Seek to Understand

Everyone wants to be heard and understood, which is the forefront of your customer care policy should focus on simply listening. When you listen to customer feedback, you also open the doors to many future improvements and developments because customers will be the first to tell you what they don’t like, what they would like to see, and how they think you should be doing things differently. In other words, stop making costly assumptions.

#2 Interact and Engage

When a person takes the time to interact with your brand, be it a question they leave on a product page or a comment they make on a social media post, you should always make an effort to respond and engage them. Not only does being a responsive company show that you’re a responsible company, but with technology increasing the need for instantaneous responses, this policy will help reassure your customers that you’re listening and that they matter.

#3 Show Your Personality

Every brand should work to portray a consistent and strong brand persona. What’s yours? If you can answer that question, you’re off to a good start. Now you need to make sure that your business’ personality shines through in every customer interaction, whether you’re sending out a marketing email, answering the phone, or chatting with them live. Additionally, you should find ways to communicate with personality without wasting time on lengthy exchanges. Be quick and be authentic.

#4 Eliminate The Barriers

On the topic of saving time, one thing many companies have begun to do in recent years is rethink their policies. If you have paper-based processes and other hassles worked into your procedures, it’s time to eliminate them. These things only pose as obstacles for your customers, even if they benefit your business to a small degree. So, instead of having customers input their information twice, find ways to structure your database, use cookies, and empower technology to reduce their clicks. It may not sound like a big deal, but these little things can quickly irritate your customers who are just about always in a hurry.

#5 Make and Keep Promises

As a company, you make all sorts of commitments that you might not even think twice about. Whether it’s promising them that their favorite items will be “back in stock soon” or that their package is expected to arrive by Friday. Things happen that are out of your control sometimes, but it’s very important that you always do your best to keep these seemingly small promises, or you risk upsetting your customers who may very well be counting on you to come through. Promise big and deliver even better. What do you do to inspire customer loyalty?

With the COVID-19 pandemic closing down many traditional workspaces and pushing people into their makeshift home offices, the workplace trends for fall of 2021 promise a new approach that allows those willing and able to return to the office a chance to do it safely. So, without further ado, here’s a look at the workplace trends you can expect as COVID-19 continues to change the way we interact.

#1 More Companies Will Remain “Hybrid”

More people than ever worked from home in 2020 and the beginer of 2021, but as fall approaches, more people will soon be returning to the office. Of course, that doesn’t mean the remote working trend is over! With many major corporations like Microsoft saying their remote workforce is here to stay, there’s going to be a fairly even split between those working from the office and those working from home (either part-time or full-time, depending on their position).

#2 Sanitary By Design

Proper hygiene will be engrained into office spaces, which may mean adding sinks to break rooms and kitchenettes, putting hand sanitizer dispensers throughout common areas, and making adjustments to the standard cleaning procedures. More offices may also begin seeing assigned lockers over “free for all” storage areas along with certain things, like access to cabinets and file drawers, being restricted to certain individuals to minimize shared-touch surfaces.

#3 Less Assigned Seating, More Boundaries

The face of collaboration is expected to look much different heading into fall 2021. Quite surprisingly, that might just mean “hot seats” are used more widely. Hot seating is a trend that came about in 2020, and it’s all about taking away assigned work spaces and instead allowing workers to choose their desk/space on a first-come, first-serve basis. While that might sound less sanitary, it’s actually becoming a more widespread practice.

This is because cleaners are often told to leave personal items alone when cleaning desks, but with unassigned seating, desks will be left with only the essentials at the end of the day, allowing for true sanitation and deep cleaning throughout the office. Of course, the modern office will also include physical boundaries or shields, be them walls, curtains, or clear plexiglass. Meanwhile, employees won’t be sitting directly across or right next to one another.

#4 Touch-less Technology

Hands-free technology has already begun working its way into the workplace, and this trend is only expected to continue, be it for visitor check-in (where QR code scanning is often used), automatic entryways, or light switches. Artificial intelligence will play a role in the touch-less revolution, too, with more people using voice assistants and other such technology.

#5 Naturally Better Air Quality

From antimicrobial materials such as copper to building materials that resist mold and promote better IAQ (indoor air quality), more and more construction companies are being asked to utilize natural materials for office design. Meanwhile, additions to the space — like beautiful plants and foliage — can help further promote good air quality. In addition, the importance of improved traditional filtration through HVAC systems can’t be under-stressed.

All of that means you can expect more greenery in the workplace come in fall 2021 as designers begin to merge the indoors with the outdoors and all of these changes can also mean a morale boost.

What trends do you hope to see in fall 2021?

Through the midst of a pandemic, we have witnessed society react and evolve in unpredictable ways – and this couldn’t be truer in the context of customer service during COVID. From the bewildering moment that the world locked down, E-commerce encountered an unexpected spike. Suddenly the world took to digital means to acquire the various commodities usually available at the nearest shopping mall. Meanwhile, brands and businesses needed to provide reimbursements to customers following forced cancellations, and use financial investments as collateral against market volatility. Customer satisfaction was damaged.

It is undeniable that a feeling of global unrest has affected every area of living. However, as the world resurfaces, it’s time for companies to rekindle with their customers with a refreshed and revised service approach; one that recognizes the constant shifts in advisories and guidance, meanwhile, evolving around unfamiliar territory. In this article, we’ll discuss the best ways to increase customer satisfaction online during COVID.

Stay Connected with Customers Online

Though market volatility is slowly leveling out, the requirement of customer service is that it is incredibly versatile, compassionate, and transparent where possible. While there have been inevitable dips in customer satisfaction, for such reasons as cancellation requests or service delays, there’s been simultaneous activity where customers have turned online for almost everything – from grocery deliveries to subscriptions to workout apps in the absence of a gym. Therefore, the digital landscape has provided businesses that usually operate in the physical world an opportunity to connect with customers online as a way of staying connected.

Throughout the thick of lockdown, while the public was encouraged to stay at home, the majority of customer services became entirely online-based. From chatbots to social media, businesses have had the means to stay connected with their customers online. Consequently, as physical stores begin to open their doors, businesses must remain agile and implement the necessary digital developments and necessities (such as contactless payment and contactless service) as a way of maintaining customer connection through online means. These measures have been introduced for the sake of safety, and showing your customers the willingness to ensure theirs awards them peace of mind.

In concurrence, maintain an up-to-date website and fresh social feed – keep your customers aware of business developments. Always have someone available to respond to customers via social, email, instant messaging, and chatbots.

Track Customer Satisfaction

From the smorgasbord of digital tools available – from Google Analytics through to social Business Manager accounts – all levels of customer engagement can be instantly tracked. The rich data and metrics cultivated at the touch of a button offers businesses deep insights into customer behavior and engagement, and therefore, the overall level of satisfaction. Tracking customer satisfaction throughout COVID is key for knowing what your customers do and do not want to see or hear from you.

Promo codes, competitions, or even messages of sincerity are actionable ways to retain customer satisfaction. Each of these can be tracked. Recognizing which social posts customers identify most with from social engagement metrics gives business owners an understanding of the most captivating content for customers. It isn’t a difficult task to look back over your social media to gain an overview of the most engaging content you distribute. The amount number of Likes, Shares, Re-Tweets, Subscriptions, and Comments (etc) etc. that your social content attracts is a very quick method in which you can gauge an impression of engagement.

Better Your Online Experience

Enhancing the online experience of your customers is key in combatting service restrictions during COVID. Updated social, website, and email contact (all of which conducted in a non-spammy way) makes you appear proactive, communicative, and interested in the customer’s online experience. The digital landscape presents a whole scope of opportunity to serve your product or service offerings – use video and imagery to showcase products. Take the opportunity to look into alternative methods to accentuate a customer’s online experience (with such growing trends as voice commerce and influencer marketing).

Remain current despite any personal restrictions. Establish the means to approach the demand for immediate customer communication. Though there is less emphasis on customer support teams in comparison to the first few months of the COVID crisis, the requirement for customer service availability has by no means relaxed. Uncertainties remain while we continue to witness various locations across the world going into intermittent lockdowns. Therefore, it is critical to be accessible to your customers by offering a refined online experience.

Overcoming the Challenges of COVID

There is no denying that COVID has placed tremendous pressure on achieving and retaining customer satisfaction online. However, as well as being a challenge, it has also allowed a business to invoke its capacity to be adaptable, agile, proactive, and reactive in its approach to customer satisfaction. The digital landscape is relentless in its offering of tools and procedures to increase customer satisfaction online during COVID, so use them to their full potential.