Like many Americans, I found myself glued to a new TV show, “Undercover Boss”, that aired right after the Super Bowl.  Something about this show had ALL of my previously raucous party attendees riveted for an hour.

At first, it seemed like the show was about ‘spying on employees’ and sort of made me feel sick given my commitment to helping companies understand the link between employee loyalty and customer loyalty…and ultimately business success. After awhile, however, it became evident that even if the boss’s original intent HAD been to spy on his employees to find them doing something wrong, the real experience became something very different…the boss (Larry O’Donnell, President and C.O.O. of Waste Management), via various entry level roles such as cleaning portable toilets and collecting garbage, got a REAL view of what it’s like to work for Waste Management.

This view from the ground made him realize that:

• He has some terrific employees who are devoted to providing good service
• Many of the guidelines and policies that he and the board had implemented over the past year were actually serving as obstacles to his employees’ best efforts.

How many organizations are in this same position? Do YOU know what you are doing to keep your employees from bringing their best intentions to the job? As we’ve discussed before, employee satisfaction is on a steep decline in the U.S., which impacts the bottom-line at companies all over America.

Could this trend be reversed if more managers and executives spent just a little bit of time to experience their organization from their employees’ perspective? It sure couldn’t hurt… Could this new reality show help people in charge consider doing a little ‘snooping around’ of their own? We can only hope…

Guest Blogger: Lynn Hunsaker, head of ClearAction Customer Experience Management

Why do sales and service representatives feel compelled to tell customers how to answer a survey? Does the company want to know what the customers really think, or is the company trying to build positive publicity by claiming superior ratings?

The answer to the second question exposes the company’s culture and customer experience management motives — whether they are striving to be customer centric (eager to know and act on what customers really think), or happy to be self centric (eager for positive publicity). Maybe the motive behind the satisfaction survey depends on the sponsoring organization; perhaps a Marketing-sponsored satisfaction survey will naturally lean toward PR objectives, while a Quality-sponsored satisfaction survey will naturally lean toward continual improvement. Regardless of the sponsor, here’s why it’s best to pursue a customer centric survey strategy:

1) Investment: Surveys are an investment of customer time and of company funds, manpower and time – aren’t there more straightforward (honest) and cost-effective ways to build positive publicity? From a statistical view, manipulated surveys are worthless. Even the positive publicity is not sustainable, if it is inaccurate. Telling customers how to respond to a survey makes the survey results invalid, and the whole effort a waste of everyone’s time and money.

2) Customer Management: Many companies are concerned with respondent fatigue issues, so it’s essential to design surveys wisely and use results wisely. And since customer expectations can rise after they participate in a survey, it’s wise to have a well-established process in place to act promptly and systemically on survey results.

3) Growth: Marketing is overlooking lucrative opportunities to heighten their value within the organization if they do not view their role as a voice of the customer conduit into all functional areas across the company.

The answer to the first question reveals weaknesses in the company’s performance management strategy — either imbalanced scorecards or poor training of employees. Customer experience management scorecards should balance lagging indicators and leading indicators, with greater weight placed on the latter. Leading indicators are metrics that are actionable at the manager and worker levels, with a strong (predictive) tie to the customer survey ratings, and which can be measured before customers experience their effects. Survey results are lagging indicators because they reflect what customers have already experienced. If sales and service employees know their performance is being measured primarily by leading indicators, and secondarily by lagging indicators, their compulsion to tell customers how to rate them will be lessened. With the proper setup of customer satisfaction incentive pay, employees should be trained to respect customer’s pure assessments of the business and its related services, and to welcome constructive customer feedback.

The practice of coaching customers on satisfaction surveys should end! Customers feel insulted to be told what to say, especially in our Web 2.0 world, where customers are now accustomed to thinking independently and voicing their true opinions. To end this manipulation, go to the root cause of it: the company’s motives and/or the employees’ bonus calculation. Customers will reward you well for doing the right thing the right way.

Contact Lynn to find out how to customize these tips to your situation.

Lynn Hunsaker, founder of ClearAction, specializes in customer-centric culture-building, customer data ROI, and cross-organizational engagement to deliver brand promises. Lynn has rich hybrid skills and executive experience in marketing & market research, process improvement & quality, organizational development & change management, and leadership & teaching. She managed customer experience programs for more than half of her career, and her executive roles include Head of Corporate Quality, Director of Marketing & Business Development, Manager of Voice of the Customer, Manager of Customer Services, Manager of Strategic Information, and Market Research Manager. She has worked with Accountants Inc, Adecco, Anritsu, Applied Materials, Cadence, Deltek, FormFactor, Hospira, Merck, MicroWarehouse, Sonoco, SunPower, and many other companies.

This week I filmed a cable show with a colleague of mine, Cherryll Sevy of Cypress Ridge Consulting, to explore the relationship between employee loyalty and customer loyalty.

We got started on this topic a month or so ago when discussing our respective work with clients: her focus is on employee retention and mine is on customer loyalty.  We are both passionate about helping organizations be more successful from our different perspectives…and we realized that our clients that don’t focus on ‘loyalty’ as a priority are least likely to emerge from this recession in a healthy position…or at all.

As we explored this topic, we found a multitude of information that supported our hunch about the link between employee and customer loyalty:

- Southwest Airlines is rated the #1 place to work in Glassdoor.com’s 2nd annual Employees’ Choice Awards.…is it just coincidence that this same organization rates as one of the highest in customer satisfaction/loyalty?

- Deborah Schmidt of Loyalty Leader, Inc. recently wrote an article, “Unhappy Employees Create Dissatisfied Customers“, that explores the many facets of this connection and provides some great advice to employees.

- Walker Information has been tracking the relationship between employee and customer loyalty for the past 8 years and finds that both types of loyalty consistently move in parallel to one another.

Given this strong connection, it’s a very bad omen to those of us who are passionate about customer loyalty that employee satisfaction is at a record low.  According to a study by the Conference Board, only 45% of U.S. workers are satisfied with their jobs compared to 61% in 1987…and the numbers have been declining over the past 20 years.

During a recession where companies believe that they are in the driver’s seat since unemployment is high, it’s especially vital to remember this inextricable relationship…if organizations don’t consider employee loyalty a priority, it will inevitably show up in the quality of their customer relationships.  Just remember the last time you had contact with someone from a company that had obviously ‘checked out’ and was unhappy with their job…how good was THAT experience?  What did that do for your commitment to that company?

Let’s all spread the word out there to not forget about the importance of employee satisfaction/loyalty…it’s common sense, but another area that is not common practice.

This is a blog entry by guest blogger, Reena Kapoor of Conifer Consulting.  Reena is a pre-eminent product marketing consultant and this entry shows one of her key values in the work she does with clients.

An excellent video talk by Joseph Pine on What Consumers Really Want. He talks about how we’ve evolved from economy that was based on commodities, to goods, to services and now its about creating and selling experience.  In this context, authenticity is the new consumer sensibility and it’s what consumers want to experience.  We’re hearing this with social networking/web 2.0 taking off as well.  But the question remains: what is authenticity and how do we (as businesses) render it effectively?