How Job Satisfaction Can Affect Customer Loyalty
Do not underestimate the power of job satisfaction when keeping your customers loyal..
Employees who are dissatisfied with their
positions are a tremendous obstacle to developing customer loyalty.
Some recent research that surveyed 1,597
employed executives (conducted by ExecuNet) revealed some interesting facts:
At least 1 of 3 executives were dissatisfied with their positions - or in more
simple terms ready to jump ship. If the executive was in sales, that
dissatisfaction translated into almost 1 in 2.
The further away the executive was from external customers the higher
they rated their job satisfaction.
This last statistic reminds me of a quote by Charles Schultz:
"I love mankind. It is people that I cannot stand."
Since business is all about people, this statistic reveals a lot of
people truly do not understand the purpose of business is to attract
and maintain customers.
When internal customers (employees) be they executives or front line
workers become dissatisfied with their positions, the end result is that
their interactions with others become unauthentic. In other words, there is
a whole lot of negative energy flowing through the organization. The goal to
become a high performance organization, if that is one of the goals, will
never be achieved.
Additionally, these negative feelings are both conscious and subconscious.
As human beings, our emotional feelings and being unsatisfied has emotional
connections. We need to remember that all feelings can be heard, seen and
most importantly felt by many around us.
The bottom line is that all businesses have some very real challenges to
overcome.
Now is the time to determine why your employees are unhappy especially
those who have first contact with your external customers. Your organization
may need to engage in organizational assessments that
are aligned to recognized quality criteria such as "Baldrige" or individual assessments that look beyond the "How" of behavior to the
"Whys" of behavior.
Developing your employees based upon
the results of these assessments is the next step. Then, reassessing your
actions to determine the impact of the development and coaching is the
final step. Failing to take these corrective actions may not only result in
unhappy employees, but in higher customer turnover and lower profitability.
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