In a recent opinion piece found at www.chiefexecutive.net, Bob Donnelly looks at the importance of employee engagement when considering customer retention and a company’s bottom line.
As Adam stated in October 1st Viewpoint article: “understood in business is the axiom that happy staff translates to happy customers. A derivative of this axiom is unhappy workers will quit.”
I will take the second sentence one step further, adding that unhappy workers are also less engaged with their employer and are more likely to show indifference to customers.
So, what is your company’s method for evaluating employee engagement? Well, if you’re like most small to mid-sized companies, there is no method to quantify: If you’re happy you stay, if you’re unhappy you go. What is so difficult about that! Well, let’s take a look at some of the below statistics, as you may change your mind in how carefully you look at employee engagement in your organization.
Take a look at some of the following stats on employee engagement:
* Only 29% of employees are fully engaged.
* While 19 % of employees show complete disengagement and 52% show average levels of engagement.
What will ‘indifference’ do for customer retention???
* -60% of all customers stop dealing with a company because of perceived indifference on the part of an employee.
* -80% state that they will never buy from a company after a negative experience.
What can employee engagement do for your bottom line???
* Best Buy demonstrated that an increase in employee engagement at the store level by as little as 0.1% (on a 5 point scale) resulted in an annual profit increase of $100,000 for those stores.
With these troubled economic times and unemployment itching at 10%, most would say their employees are happy to have a job, and are thus engaged…The above numbers may paint a different underlying picture on employee sentiment, and companies that carefully look at their employee engagement may just benefit in guest retention.
In the following weeks we will look at some strategies and additional examples of how companies have been able to increase their engagement with employees.
Reach the Chief Executive article here.
