If your employees aren't happy, your customers probably aren't happy too..

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What would be worse? To hear your staff complain that your company is not a great place to work? Or to hear someone complain that your company doesn't care much about its customers?

You wouldn't want to hear either but don't start thinking about addressing one over the other. The reality is that if your employees are saying this, your customers are most likely saying it as well anyway! 

Research shows that employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction are closely aligned which means that if your staff don't look forward to coming to work, your customers don't really like doing business with you either. 

Now, as you read this I am sure that some of you (employees) may be thinking 'I don't like coming to work' whilst some executives are thinking 'we've heard those comments from our staff and our customers!' So is this all bad?

Thankfully it’s not and here are some encouraging statistics -  

  • 72% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively affect customer service (Source: CIPD)

  • 90% of leaders think that an employee engagement strategy has an impact on business success (Source: Accor)

  • 80% of the variation in employee engagement levels is due to the line manager (Source: Accenture)

  • More than 50% of organisations with high employee engagement retain more than 80% of their customers (Source: Demand Metric)

  • 1 in 2 employees in large organisations feel engaged (Source: Tenikin Research Group)

The above numbers show that if you put strategies in place to improve employee engagement, the satisfaction ratings for both staff and customers can quickly improve too. 

Organisations need to be proactive to shift a culture. Changing the culture across any business requires a process and it needs to start at the top. Focusing on employee satisfaction is a great place to start.

The first initiative may be to improve the lines of communication in your organisation between management and the customer service teams. You can do this by providing a forum for these employees to feed back to the business what customers are telling them.  Whether the feedback is positive or not, whether they are suggestions, compliments, complaints or abuse. The only way to give people, both employees and customers, what they want is to have a forum to capture the noise.

Encourage your staff for their input and suggestions for better customer engagement. They want to be more engaged, they want to feel that they can add value to management decisions. In turn management needs to be open to listening, especially to those people in roles where they are talking to customers every day.

“Vital to every operation is cooperation.” Frank Tyger.

If you help your employees feel more involved and engaged, they will have a better attitude when they are talking to customers and it will be noticed. Likewise, providing customers with a forum to feed back to the business about how they would prefer to be engaged in the future is a major positive step.