Recognising when our people do good things for us, our company and our customers is important - communicating the fact that we not only recognise what they do but appreciate it and are grateful, is equally important.

Recruitment company www.monster.co.uk published a survey this week which found that more than half of UK employees believe they are not thanked enough at work. It also found that 54% feel under-appreciated and 41% feel demotivated (read more here).

In today’s highly pressured and competitive service environment, we need our people to be fully motivated and engaged, which means it is more important than ever to remember to praise and to thank them when they consistently perform well, or outperform.

Failure to do so leads to an unhappy and disengaged workforce. Numerous studies including research by Gallup, have demonstrated a correlation between strong employee engagement and high organisational productivity and performance, including financial performance. So, taking time to say thank you makes sense from a number of standpoints.

Thanks and praise, must be warranted and sincere, which is why recognising what good looks like is an important prerequisite for enabling us to distinguish between poor, mediocre, competent and superior performance. 

Customer service today is a complex blend of self serve and personalisation, and  managers today need to deploy different skillsets to be the catalyst for change in their organisation. In particular they need to effectively and concisely  translate feedback from increasingly  mobile ‘always on’ consumers contacting organisations in many different ways including social media. In many instances all of this complexity is compounded by mixed delivery models of inhouse, outsourced offshore not to mention virtual and homeworking scenarios. Managers need to recruit for superior soft skills in handling people, empathy, an ability to problem solve and to collaborate in real-time across different technology platforms and via different communication channels.  In this context, it is important for senior management to stay abreast of best practice, to anchor what is good and to recognise and reward their best people.

Introducing a degree of objectivity into the process is important. That is where Global Standard© has a role to play as Version 6 has a sharp focus on finding strengths within an organisation and delivering the structured intelligence managers need to ensure that good performers achieve the recognition they deserve.

The growing number of organisations that have attained Global Standard© understand the benefits that accrue from being able to shine a bright light on their own practices and also being able to gauge how they measure up against ‘best in breed’ organisations from a range of sectors.

We are proud of the fact that around 20% of people working in contact centres in the UK are now accredited and that Standard© has been a driving force for continuous improvement for more than a decade in so many diverse public and private sector organisations.

On June 26 we will bring together many of the organisations who have successfully undergone Standard© accreditation at a special launch event for Version 6 in London (more info here).  It will be a brilliant opportunity to take stock of how far we have all come on this journey as well as the perfect opportunity for us at CCA to say ‘thank you’ for your continued support in our mission to ensure that our members continue to be exemplars in customer service.