The holy grail for organisations is customer loyalty. Less talked about but more important to building a brand is internal customer (employee loyalty). Simply put, you can’t build a great (or even good) brand if your people aren’t engaged, or you are constantly replacing people.
So, what are the things that help earn employee loyalty (and, no, the size of their pay packet isn’t one of them) – that add up to a place where people want to work and keep working at?
No rocket science here:
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Customer focused mission: make sure your mission is focused on making their role engaging and fulfilling
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Customer’s REAL needs: everything you do should be filtered through the 3 key emotional needs of your internal customer: Trust / Easier or better life / Being valued by you and giving true value to your customer
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Go the Extra Inch: constant development and improvement: NO EXTRA MILES!!! and no lurches and radical changes!
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Measure: put simple empowering clear measures in place that motivate and engage them: then put simple fun incentives in place around these. On a minimum of an annual basis , get an external Company in to do an employee feedback exercise FACE TO FACE NOT BY EMAIL OR WEB FORM! (These are your key customers … an email or web feedback exercise is insulting and detrimental!)
4 simple rules: but oh how rare it is to find a business that does this brilliantly!
….it isn’t sufficient to have employees be satisfied, loyal, and even engaged. If the goal is optimizing customer-perceived value and customer behavior, then companies need to move beyond engagement – which has many definitions and only marginal correlation to, and not much causation of, customer loyalty and customer commitment – then, I’d respectfully suggest that employee ambassadorship is the real objective:
http://www.customerthink.com/article/linking_employee_behavior_to_customer_loyalty_advocacy
http://www.customerthink.com/blog/driving_customer_loyalty_behavior_through_employee_ambassadorship_vs_employee_engagement
Great point Michael: i agree with you: but I would also suggest that many (or most) businesses would do hugely well just to get to ‘loyal and engaged’ … as it still seems to be a rare phenomenon!
Rephrased: “just achieving these results may retain employees and keep them happy; but it doesn’t [necessarily] drive customer behavior.” The most highly regarded, best to work for companies (e.g. Container Store, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos) have both.
….relate to customers. Particularly with regard to customer-centric mission and understanding customers’ emotional/relationship and rational/functional needs for better delivery of value, it has been well-proven that neither of these goals can be strategically met through employee satisfaction or basic engagement. So, again, just focusing on the achievement of these results may retain employees and keep them happy; but it doesn’t actively drive customer behavior, beyond the superficial and tangential.
….committed to the company as an entity, committed to the overall value proposition that the company’s products and services represent, and committed to the customer, then I agree. The companies you cite are included in the Fortune Magazine 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, and for good reason: They practice employee ambassadorship, which drives both customer and staff behavior, as well as shaping the customer-centric enterprise culture and the level of integrity, toward each other, toward the company, and toward the customer.
These are important issues – and important connections – for every enterprise. I covered this topic pretty extensively in a two-part CustomerThink blog last year (second blog embedded): http://www.customerthink.com/blog/employee_ambassdorship_and_advocacy_research_delivering_wow_customer_value_part_ii_study_findin And, there will be a webinar on this subject for Beyond Philosophy coming up in early October.
My 4 principles relate to the internal customer just as much (in fact more) than the external customer. We have seen significant (and truly amazing) results using these 4 principles with companies, both internally and externally.
I can see the research you cite is very p[owerful (and helpful) but I know from 1st hand experience that these 4 simple (blindingly obvious common sense) principles, when applied correctly, make a huge impact.
You are right, a satisfied employee can make any business grow as well as customer can give more sales. I loved reading this post. Thank you