The evidence continues to accumulate: happy, satisfied, highly engaged employees help increase customer satisfaction.  And vice versa.

Why is this?

• Customers like to do business with people who have good attitudes.

How many times have you done business with a company and gotten the impression that people just don’t like working there?  Their unhappiness/dissatisfaction oozes from their pores and can’t help but impact their interactions with customers.  And it makes you want to shudder to think about how your employees’ negative attitudes about your products/services could impact your customers’ own attitudes…

• Knowledgeable, experienced employees make it easier to do business with your company.

Employees who have worked at your company for a long period of time and have mastered their jobs, understand procedures, and know when to escalate issues are a huge asset when it comes to providing satisfying customer interactions.  And the only way to retain your employees is through high levels of satisfaction and engagement.  Starbucks makes this a very high priority, knowing that there are bottom-line benefits for them.

• Your employees are an important tool for understanding your customers.

Your employees who work directly with customers are constantly receiving input about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to doing business with you.  And they also know what other options your customers have and how you measure up.  It’s important that your employees feel engaged and invested enough to share this information with others in the organization, enabling you to ensure that your products, services, and policies are in synch with what your customers want.

There are other factors at play which drive the close relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, but these are three of the most important ones.

And if you wonder why good service is hard to find these days, consider this: only about fifty-percent of employees are satisfied with their jobs — and only one in five are passionate about their work.

Some very successful companies have a radical approach: employees first, customers second.  There must be a reason for that thinking.

If you consider customer satisfaction and loyalty an important strategy for your company, be sure to invest some energy in understanding and measuring your employees’ satisfaction/loyalty also.  The results could be enlightening and help you understand why your customer sat/loyalty numbers aren’t quite what you are hoping for.

It sounds so obvious.

Is there anything more important in your efforts to keep customers happy?

I’m in the middle of a situation with Samsung where my new networked printer isn’t working because it requires a new network card.   Samsung handled things great.  After several support calls that didn’t fix the situation, they realized that the card needed to be replaced and ordered a new one.  And escalated me to receive in-person support to install the card through a third party company.

This is where things got frustrating.  I was promised that someone would call me to make an appointment to come work on the printer.  No such luck.  After 4 business days, I still haven’t received a call from the support company, but have called THEM 6 times to follow up to see when someone is coming out.  Apparently they themselves can’t get the local technician to respond to them after many phone calls.

OK, understood.  You have a ‘bad’ employee.  Good to know.  So, what are you going to DO about it?

Your customers shouldn’t have to chase you down to get your products to work.  We all know that there are going to be problems with technology or service from time to time, but we expect the companies we do business with to take responsibility and make the situation as painless as possible.

My advice for how to keep your customers happy when products and/or service fails:

1) Communicate to your customer to let them know the status of the situation.

Once you/your reps realize that the normal system hasn’t worked as planned, they should proactively communicate with the customer vs. expecting the customer to follow up themselves (or hoping that they won’t?).

2) Let them know that you care.

Your customers will be extremely tolerant if they know that you understand the imposition that your product/service failure is causing IF you use a little empathy…put yourself in their shoes.  God forbid, maybe even APOLOGIZE.  It goes so far!

Likewise, if you fail to do this step properly and sincerely, you are on your way to losing a customer.  Who wants to do business with a company that doesn’t value you as a customer?

3) Have a back-up plan and don’t be afraid to use it.

Have logical escalation points and processes to put into place when the standard systems don’t work.  Again, don’t make your customers do the work…have the back-up plan in place and know when to use it.  Your reps shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to serve your customers.

4) Do what you say you’ll do.

Make sure that if your reps say they are escalating something that they DO so.   And then they go back to Step #1 until the situation is resolved.

Training.  Processes.  Commitment.  CARING.

That’s what is involved.  It’s the cost of doing business.  If you don’t do these things, you just don’t deserve my business.  Period.

I’m a huge fan of companies who solicit my feedback after I’ve done business with them…after all, that IS the business I’m in—ensuring that companies have information about how well they are meeting their customers’ needs.  However, I definitely think that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this.

How many of you have been asked the following question (or some variation) at the end of an interaction, whether in person or on the phone?

“When you receive our follow-up survey, will you give me a good rating?”

Sure, it’s great that customer service staff who ask this question 1) know that they are being measured based on how satisfied customers and 2) care about the measurement.  But when they ask this question, do they REALLY want to go further to ensure that I’m a satisfied customer?  What will they do when they get a ‘No’ response?

I personally think that referring to ANY post-encounter survey, except to encourage you to take the time to complete it, is just TACKY…certainly there are better ways to ensure that you have fully met a customer’s expectations such as:

• “Is there anything else I can do to help you today?”
• “Have we resolved all of the issues you called about?”

These variations still help ensure that you have a satisfied customer on your hands, but don’t come off quite as pushy or needy…but what do you think?

Guest Blogger, Gary Katz of Marketing Operations Partners.

Earlier this year I read Bill Stinnett’s excellent book, Think Like Your Customer, which should be required reading for anyone in Sales and Marketing, especially if you market high-value products and services.

A glaring Marketing Operations disconnect for many companies is our tendency to over-focus on What and How we want to sell, when we really need to develop a deeper understanding of What, Why and How our customers buy. Those of us in MO need to assert leadership in aligning our company’s sales process with our customers’ buying process.

The healing starts at home. Our collective lack of effectiveness in supporting one of our primary customers, Sales, surely speaks to the growing emphasis today on Sales and Marketing alignment.

Yes, Sales and Marketing have equal roles in this often dysfunctional relationship. Yet it is incumbent on us as marketers to take responsibility for cleaning up our side of the house if we want a shot at a healthy, mutual partnership with Sales. If you’ve been in a long-term business relationship or a marriage, you know what I mean. Our unilateral thinking and actions impact the overall health of the system, for better or for worse.

So how does all of this relate to Stinnett’s book? I’ve gleaned a couple of key insights below that are especially meaningful to me. I also discuss some possible implications of these insights, which I recommend my fellow marketers and MO practitioners seriously ponder:

1. We need to remember our customers are buying a desired outcome, not a solution. Our organizational focus should be on understanding the gap between our customers’/prospects’ current state and their desired future state – the motive, the urgency, the payback, the consequences of inaction, the means to act, the perceived risks in acting.

Implications for marketers: We can best support Sales by providing the process and means to better understand this gap. We also need to deliver collateral and marketing programs that attract prospects interested in bridging the gap. We need to continually ask ourselves some key questions to ensure that our selling process is not just aligned with the customer, but with our business goals. How well can we fill the gap for the customer and still meet our profit objectives? How can we support Sales to ensure that new sales reps are properly trained to act in accord with this customer-centric approach?

2. We need to understand our customers’ buying process and imperative to buy. Where are they in the buying process? What do they need to do next? Who else is part of the decision process? How can we enable our customer champions to take the next step in the buying process? We need to understand the motive behind the potential selling opportunity motive to support sales reps. Is the reason to buy a planned replacement, an unplanned replacement, a
new purchase to keep up with the competition or a new purchase to get
ahead? Is the initiative supported from the top-down or is it
bottom-up? How does this initiative rank in terms of priority compared to other initiatives the customer might choose to fund? If we don’t understand these fundamental buying factors, we won’t be able to support Sales with strategic intent. We’ll just be providing air cover, absent a battle.

Implications for marketers: The programs we establish, the campaigns we develop, the tools we create need to be geared toward helping Sales help our customers to buy. Does Sales believe our marketing programs, campaigns and sales tools contribute to gaining greater access to qualified prospects? Reaching “hidden” decision makers? Equipping customer champions to sell on our behalf? Is there significant tension for the customer to buy? Our credibility with Sales is at stake. Our sales reps need to trust that the leads we provide are legitimate qualified opportunities. They’ll have much greater respect for us and the quality of our leads if we take the responsibility to nurture prospects until they are truly ready to buy. This means, when the customer has demonstrated that they know what they are buying, why they are buying and how they are going to buy it. The last thing we want to do is waste our sales resources on a sourcing decision (“Who will I buy from?”) when we (and/or our prospect) don’t have a strong handle on the why, what and how.

It really comes down to aligning our internal sales and marketing process (with our internal customer, Sales) with our customer buying process. This is a fruitful area for Marketing Operations to focus. Our contributions can make a real difference in our organization’s ability to:

• Attract and win the right prospects and customers
• Nimbly and appropriately respond to sales opportunities, based on a sound understanding of where prospects are in their buying cycles
• Optimize our sales resources to focus on high-touch, ready-to-buy opportunities
• Empower our customer champions to be highly effective advocates of our value proposition
• Mobilize our marketing resources – programs, campaigns, collateral – where they will have the greatest impact

Gary Katz is founder and CEO of Marketing Operations Partners, a training and consulting firm seeking to evolve the emerging Marketing Operations discipline into a valued Chief of Staff function for the CMO. Gary is a visionary and thought leader in the Marketing Operations field, who began teaching the first known US university class on Marketing Operations at UCSC Extension in 2008. For more information, visit www.mopartners.com.