RETENTION & CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!!
Everyone understands that customer satisfaction is one of the most – if not the most – important factors in business survival and growth. This is another reason that retention is so critical.
Simply Stated: Employees who are satisfied with their work, their company, and their boss are more likely to create and ensure satisfied customers!
Although this may be intuitively obvious, a new growing body of research supports this correlation.
One solid example of this correlation was amply illustrated by Sears Roebuck. In the early 1990’s, this once extremely successful corporation was rapidly losing both money and customers! They hired a Consultant and a new Management Team of experts. They were hired on to stop the losses and to revitalize the “aging” retail giant.
As reported in a landmark Harvard Business Review article, one of the top initiatives undertaken by the new Management Team was a study that involved eight-hundred company stores and thousands of store employees. The study examined a number of important relationships and found:
1. Negative employee attitudes and behaviors adversely affected the satisfaction of Sears customers.
2. The extent to which store employees understood their actual job descriptions and the company’s overall strategic objectives had a direct bearing on their behaviors and their attitudes.
3. High employee turnover reduced the overall customer satisfaction and store revenues.
The study concluded that employees’ attitudes toward their performance and toward Sears were both negative and it was these negative attitudes were producing employee behaviors that measurably reduced customer satisfaction and sales revenues. With this new insight, Sears developed an “employee-customer profit chain model” that quantified the causal links between the employees’ attitudes, tenure, and financial performance of their store. They even created actual formulas that were capable of predicting the impact of employee attitude, tenure, and behaviors on revenues.
Sears drew many conclusions with their work. One other example was a multi-company project that concluded that “employee attachment predicts customer attachment.” When an employee feels attached to their company, there are more likely to share their positives images with their customers. When a customer hears positive testimonials, especially from their salesperson, they are more likely to buy from that store!
Finally, a William M. Mercer survey of Sr. Human Resource Executives in large enterprises reported that “more than half of study participants see poor customer service as a consequence of attraction and retention problems.”
You MUST retain your “Happy Employees” in order to ensure your “Customers Overall Satisfaction!”
Nancy J. Phillips, CPC
