How Health and Safety can improve customer satisfaction

Health and safety has spent years being on the receiving end of jokes. Over recent years, however, it has been taken more seriously.

The impact of COVID19 has definitely helped with this. Now, however, it’s time to take the next step and start viewing health and safety as a key factor in determining customer satisfaction, Peter Watson, Director of Watson and Watson Health and Safety Consultants shares his knowledge on how businesses can achieve this.

Seamless operations make customers happy

Every employee contributes something to the success of the company. This means that anything which has a negative impact on an employee also has a negative impact on the company. What’s more, this negative impact can ripple out into the broader organization.

The most obvious way this happens is through disruptions to the business “supply chain”. When an employee is off work through illness or injury, then, usually, their work does not get done or it does not get done at the same level of efficiency.

Other employees may try to offer what cover they can and/or the employer may bring in a temp. Neither of these options, however, is likely to be as effective as having the employee at work. What’s more, trying to spread out tasks amongst the remaining employees may create further disruptions.

A less obvious way health-and-safety failures disrupt operations is by causing employees to feel unvalued, or at least undervalued. If an employee does not feel that their employer cares about them then there is very little reason for them to care about their employer or, by extension, their employer’s customers.

Negative (social) media reports make customers unhappy

Even if you manage to “put up a good front” and prevent (or at least minimize) disruption, lack of health and safety is still likely to jeopardize your customer-satisfaction rating. In turn, this may jeopardize your ability not just to get new customers but also to keep your existing ones.

Regardless of whether you’re business to business or business to consumer, your customers are likely to have concerns about dealing with a company with a poor track record on health and safety. In addition to practical concerns about potential disruption, they may be concerned about ethics and/or the effect on their own reputation.

These days, it’s extremely difficult to keep health-and-safety issues from becoming public knowledge. It’s also very dangerous to try. Quite bluntly, it’s bad enough for businesses to be ignorant of health-and-safety hazards. It’s even worse for them to know about them and do nothing about them.

Worst of all, however, is knowing about them, doing nothing about them and trying to stop people from talking about them. This can backfire hugely both in terms of HSE enforcement action and in terms of reputational damage.

Health and safety keeps customers safe

Last but definitely not least, regardless of your business sector, improving health and safety in your organization will almost certainly contribute to keeping your customers safe.

For example, even if you’re involved in some kind of knowledge work, your employees are only going to be able to deliver their very best work if they’re in a healthy and safe environment. Your employees’ ability to deliver their very best work may mean the difference between your customer breezing through their own work and spending late nights and stress on it.

In other environments, the connection may be even more direct. For example, in construction, poor health and safety could lead to buildings with faults that could compromise the health and safety of the people inside them.

In retail, poor health and safety could encourage crime and put customers at risk. In hospitality, poor health and safety could lead to unsafe food and drink (or serving practices). By contrast, putting health and safety at the forefront of all operations at all times can make life not just healthier and safer but pleasanter for both employees and customers.