16 Tips For Boosting Customer Satisfaction With Happier Employees

A great company culture trickles down through the entire organization, keeping employees happy and motivated. That positive energy also extends to your customers, creating a better overall experience.

Fostering a culture focused on employee happiness is sometimes trickier than it seems, though, so leaders need a well-planned strategy to make it a reality.

1. Align Individual Purpose With Organizational Purpose

Employee happiness is derived from finding meaning in work. Employees need to feel that they are going somewhere and that there is a chance to progress. They need to feel that their work makes a difference for an internal or an external customer. I believe the key is to figure out the organization’s purpose and everyone’s individual purpose and how those can be aligned. – Mickey A. Feher, MindsetMaps International

2. Develop A Culture Of Gratitude

A culture of gratitude creates deep roots within the organization and is contagious both internally and externally. Focusing on the good while addressing opportunities for growth is a potent combination. – Alexsys “Lexy” Thompson, Alexsys Thompson Intl

3. Integrate A Holistic Coaching Model

Employee happiness is about purpose, balance and fulfillment. If employees are happy working in a company culture that they are aligned with, the customers will feel it, and everyone will be more loyal. Having a holistic coaching model integrated into your organization with follow-up and follow-through is the key to sustaining this long-term, profitable culture. – Jennifer Helene, Purposeful Ventures, LLC

4. Keep External Branding And Internal Culture Consistent

Do not lie. Do not tell your employees one thing and your customers another. If your brand is proactive and positive, your internal culture should reflect that too. Or, if your brand is about delivering on promises, you had better deliver for your employees too. A disconnect between brand and culture causes distrust and cuts customer satisfaction. Align brand and culture honestly to delight customers. – Kelly Tyler Byrnes, Voyage Consulting Group

5. Actively Listen To Employees

Happiness comes from a sense of belonging. To help your employees feel they belong (aka company culture), the No. 1 thing you need to do is actively listen to them. Then, you wrap three tactics around that: You brand the employee experience (just like external branding), you motivate them with incentives at the group level and you incentivize them at a personal level. – Nick Leighton, Exactly Where You Want to Be

6. Solicit Feedback From Your Employees

If your goal is to create a company culture centered on employee happiness, I would suggest soliciting feedback from your employees. Oftentimes we do what we think is best rather than asking others what makes them happy. Take the feedback, find common ground and continue to build on that in a very proactive way. – RaQuel Hopkins, RH Life Coaching

7. Work To Utilize Each Employee’s Strengths

Attempting to focus on employee happiness can often lead to implementing initiatives that do not make a substantial difference in the long run. Research supports the notion that when managers work to utilize each employee’s strengths in various ways, individuals will find joy through the work they do. Finding what truly motivates each employee can then automatically positively impact customers. – Susan Madsen, Jon M. Huntsman School of Business

8. Keep Your Culture Aligned With Your Strategic Vision

Culture has to be aligned with your strategic vision and unique to your organization. As humans, we are driven by the need to affiliate, and culture is a way to attract and retain those people to help achieve the strategic vision. – Brad Cousins, Ingage Human Capital Strategies

9. Create An Empowering Journey

The employee journey is similar to the customer journey. For the journey to be experienced positively, it is less about control and command; it is about empowering the employees so that they can develop and see a purpose in what the company is striving for as a vision and what their goals and tasks are. It is about trust, peer accountability and commitment to achieving a common vision. – Michael Thiemann, Strategy-Lab™

10. Focus On Education And Transparency

Education and transparency are key. Owners and employees have to understand that if both are not engaged, productive and happy, then the customers will suffer. The key is to combine all three for the ultimate in customer satisfaction. – Donald Hatter, Donald Hatter Inc.

11. Prioritize Respect And Inclusivity

Creating a culture centered on employee happiness is a losing proposition. Happiness is not something one person can do for another, and it’s also hard to measure. I suggest rethinking this goal and instead focusing on creating a culture where people feel respected, valued, challenged and included. Each of these is actionable, easy to connect to values and behaviors and easy to measure. – Eugene Dilan, DILAN Consulting Group

12. Incorporate Compassion And Empathy

Incorporate compassion and empathy into your culture. This will increase employee retention, engagement, happiness, teamwork and innovation—all things that lead to customer satisfaction. Then, take it a step further. Incorporate the same compassion and empathy into every customer relationship. The power of empathizing with and showing compassion to customers is tremendous. – Wade Thomas, Aim to Win

13. Make Sure You’re Not Creating Toxic Positivity

Happiness is a measure of health, and we can inadvertently set up cultures that create toxic positivity versus real happiness. Wenzlaff and Wegner did a study showing that suppressing depleting emotions instead of encouraging people to express them will have a negative impact on work performance, teams and physical health. Don’t just pick certain emotions; see the range of expression as health. – Natalie McVeigh , EisnerAmper

14. Create A Picture Of What’s Most Important To Customers

Give employees a sense of purpose. You can do this by creating a picture of what is most important to the customers and empowering people to determine how to get there. One way to achieve this is to establish aspirations, goals and measurable results that cascade across your organization. As results are achieved, individuals and teams have a clear line of sight into how they impact customers. – Alan Trivedi, ADAPTOVATE

15. Help With Stress Management

While there are a variety of factors that promote employee happiness, one that directly impacts customer service is stress management. When workers feel stressed, they become impatient, irritable and often take shortcuts in their work, all of which can result in low customer satisfaction. Focus on identifying and eliminating areas of stress for your staff and provide stress reduction training. – Cheryl Czach, Cheryl Czach Coaching and Consulting, LLC

16. Be Service-Oriented

The goal is not a culture of happiness, but a culture of service to others and personal and professional growth. Being service-oriented means serving other team members, departments and customers to ensure everyone’s success. This will do the most to take care of customers. In an evolving and changing world, people must continue learning and growing to keep up with changing customer needs and goals. – Mark Samuel, IMPAQ Corporation