How satisfied are your customers? You can start by looking at your employees. There’s a growing body of research that suggests customer satisfaction is strongly tied to employee engagement - in fact employee turnover turns out to be a fairly good indicator of customers' happiness.
Now of course, customer satisfaction depends on a lot of things from quality of product to excellence in customer service. But getting employees energized and engaged is a good first step toward delivering the things customers want. In fact, researchers at University of Michigan found that employee engagement not only drives higher levels of customer satisfaction, it builds customer loyalty.
Building an Army of Employee Brand Ambassadors
When your workers feel good about the job they are doing, they naturally pass this along to customers by improving quality, reducing costs and delivering better customer service. Customer-facing employees aren’t the only ones who are carrying the torch for the brand. Every worker in your organization should be viewed as a brand ambassador - doing what they do best on behalf of the brand.
The more enthused employees are about their job, the more likely they are to want to speak up for the brand in their off-hours. With Facebook and Twitter, every employee from the clerk in the mailroom to the executive in the corner office has the potential to reach a global audience. While you want your workforce to leverage their own personal networks on behalf of your company, it’s also a good idea educate them on your social media policy.
Apple Inc. makes sure that employees are clear in their personal postings that even though they work for Apple they are speaking on their own and not for the company. I’ve mentioned before that having a clear social media policy is critical to any social business. This is especially true once you’ve empowered your workers within your organization and turned them loose as brand ambassadors.
What all this research says to me is that customer satisfaction starts deep within your organization. If you pay attention to the ways each employee is working to extend your brand promise and you give them the recognition and rewards they deserve, you can then look forward to your efforts paying off at the customer’s end of the value chain.
Learn how TemboSocial helped RBC engage their 24,000 employees as an army of ambassadors in the Blue Water Project.
