Team Engagement Activities

Here's a silver lining for small businesses in this economy: trends more typical of big companies, including automating customer service functions and employing fewer customer service representatives per (potential) customer, mean that the bar is often set fairly low for you to "over-deliver."

I speak from experience on this. Check out this feedback we just received from a company that completed our 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award application:

I especially appreciated the quick response to an email I sent to customer service. Technical support responded within 24 hours, thanked me for pointing out the mistake and assured me the problem would be fixed. I was surprised to receive a response at all.

While we pride ourselves at Winning Workplaces on delivering excellent service across all our employee engagement activities, that last sentence in the applicant's feedback wouldn't have materialized if someone they dealt with before us didn't under-deliver. Consider that in your employee engagement and team building initiatives that involve your customer service staff.

While we're on the topic of customer service, have you ever wondered what the optimal ratio of reps to customers should be? It varies, of course, but you could use as a baseline what our ratio ended up being while assisting this year's TSCW applicants.

We had 3 FTE reps to a little over 600 customers. Or a ratio of 1 to 200.

How does this compare with your current ratio? And have you seen feedback from your customers that affirms a low service bar set by your competitors that your people practices help you surpass?