Employee Attitudes and Retained Customers

According to studies mentioned in a Deloitte white paper (link to PDF) entitled Employee Value Propositions…

• 41% of customers are loyal because of good employee attitude
• 70% of customer brand perceptions are determined by experiences with people

You can have the best product in the world, spend millions advertising and marketing it and if you don’t have an engaged, enthusiastic employee with a positive attitude at the important buying moment, you have a far less chance of develop a loyal customer.

Based on experience I often think that companies are myopic in regard to this topic and wonder if the HR, Training or Org Development folks are ever invited to sit in on the presentations that the ad agencies give to the execs of how they intend to increase sales with the latest communications and advertising campaign.

Unless your organization is run by a bunch of robots and your customer interaction is done almost exclusively through electronic means, a real flesh and blood person has to be the conduit between you and your customer.  And the attitude of this customer contact individual will be key in the loyalty that the customer has with the company from that point forward.  When the company brand strategy is in line with the detailed workforce segments within the organization it can support the productivity, engagement and retention of the customer.

In their paper, Deloitte states:

Through effective coordination of employee value propositions and customer strategy, an organization can better focus its resources and effort on delivering high customer satisfaction.  The ability to deliver benefits to the top and bottom lines is thus enhanced by fully aligning these two efforts as well as by increasing the productivity of critical workforce segments and retaining key performers.”

Companies spend millions on the capital required to produce results, how much do they spend on the people who need to perform with the best attitude to ensure the capital expense is successful?

Companies will talk about recognizing employee effort, but how much do they actually spend on recognizing  and rewarding the employee’s actual performance?