How You Treat Employees Affects How They Treat Customers

Second, you must make the employee-customer connection apparent to employees. No one will put everything they’ve got into their job until they see how their daily work benefits the end customer. Lots of workers have the opportunity to see, first-hand, how their job supports the customers; however, when the employee-customer connection isn’t obvious, leaders have to show them the importance of what they do.

Case In Point: Morale was low, error rates were high and employee turnover was rampant in a factory where workers made hospital products—specifically, tubing assemblies used to deliver intravenous medication, fluids and nutrition to patients. Finally someone decided to put all the factory workers on a big yellow school bus and take them to the nearest hospital, where everyone could see the tubing assemblies they make at work. People came away saying, “So that’s what we do. Now we see why we come to work every day.” Within weeks, morale rose markedly, as did quality. Turnover dropped, and people began to work with an energy the plant manager had never seen before—simply because someone created an employee-customer connection.

Because certain positions in the tanning industry (such as bed cleaners) do not interact with customers regularly, these employees may not understand the importance of their job. Make sure your bed cleaners realize that their job is not just cleaning—it’s the means of preventing the spread of germs and illness among customers and keeping the salon looking its best.

Third, you need to get “the system” off their backs. In many businesses, there’s a substantial disconnect between those who make the policies and those who are tasked with delivering customer service. This is especially apparent for salon owners who own multiple salon locations—you obviously can’t be at each salon at once; instead, you rely on salon managers and a management system in your absence. However, you must remember that good employees won’t suffer dumb systems. (The late management thinker Peter Drucker once said that, “Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.”)

Case In Point: A national chain of cafés/bookstores has a rigid policy requiring multiple levels of approval for the purchase of any piece of equipment costing more than $100. As a result, when a commercial bagel toaster toasts its last, it takes nearly a month to replace it. During that month, the attendants at its understaffed counters have to make do with inadequate equipment and apologize to every customer for their even-slower-than-usual service.

Make sure you have policies in place that help your employees do their job—not ones that make their ability to service customers more difficult, such as lengthy turnaround times for stocking a best-selling lotion that the salon has run out of. This annoys clients, who then will take out their frustration on the employee because that’s the person they get to interact with.

Ultimately, if you’re hiring right in the first place, your people will want to do good work and deliver great customer service. But after the new wears off the job, they only will continue to do so if they are able to take real pride in what they do, if they see a direct connection between their work and paying customers and if they trust the management system is allowing them to do their very best work.

Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden are the authors of “Contented Cows MOOve Faster.” The two founded Contented Cow Partners, LLC to help business and organization leaders produce better results through a focused, fired-up and capably-led workforce. For more information, visit www.ContentedCows.com.