Loyal employees are a key factor in developing loyal customers.
People do business with those they know, like and trust
Newly hired staff CAN do a good job of showing your customers how much they believe in your company, the core values and products… they just don’t have the longevity to truly prove it yet.
It would pretty much be the equivalent to taking long term marriage advice from a newlywed. Their advice might be 100% accurate, yet they haven’t experienced and believe the very thing they are giving advice on.
Colin Shaw has a book titled The Intuitive Customer and in it, he does a great job of explaining how no matter how much research, data, and scientific you get in predicting your customers’ behavior, they will still make decisions based on what can only be described as irrational factors.
Shep Hyken further explains the point of treating your employees as well as, if not better than, your external customers because staff needs to truly know, understand, feel and experience the company and products in order for them to effectively work in the best interest of the customer.
Bringing this full circle to your business…
Customers like developing relationships with one primary person or team.
The relationships developed between staff and customers is one of those “irrational” requirements that earn the loyalty of your customers over time.
Your staff has the opportunity to get to know your customers over time. They can get to know them as people, not just customers. They can add value to the service or product by suggesting something based on an aside conversation they’ve had.
So how do you create loyal employees?
There are too many ways to cover in just this episode, but here are some of the main ways…
The mission, vision, and core values must be shared with everyone and modeled and valued by leadership.
A 2016 Gallup study states that 83% of employees feel it is very important to believe their life and work had a purpose.
It also stated that 77% of employees who have clarity around the who their company is and what they stand for plan to remain with their company for at least one year.
A Forbes article suggests instilling an employee value proposition for each role. This value proposition includes many of the typical players such as compensation and benefits, but also expands to career growth, training, mentorship, rewards, community involvement, etc.
Understand where staff want to grow, where they want to progress in their careers, skills they want to develop or fine tune.
It’s not just about pay and benefits. We’ve all had jobs where the pay was great but the work, culture, and everything else was just not worth it and we left.
This is your chance to turn this around.