How Job Satisfaction Can Affect Customer Loyalty

by Leanne Hoagland-Smith

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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