Employee Engagement Surveys --
Elevating Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Do you need to increase your company's competitiveness and profit? Where should you start? Should you focus on your employees first, or is it better to start by focusing on your customers first?

It is almost always better to start by focusing on your employees first. Highly satisfied and engaged employees are essential for achieving high levels of sustained customer satisfaction, retention loyalty. Start by listening to your employees and taking action on their ongoing feedback.

Conduct an employee survey/employee engagement survey to gather suggestions, information and insight from your employees. Ask them about what it is like to work for your company and what can be done to help them do their jobs more effectively and to do a better job of taking care of customers. Include questions about the effectiveness of internal communications, business processes, teamwork and how employees feel about your company's direction.

Your employee surveys/employee engagement surveys should also include questions about the effectiveness of supervisors and managers, empowerment, the ability of employees to make suggestions without fear of retribution, effectiveness of reward and recognition, fairness of compensation, adequacy of your employee benefits plan and treatment of diverse groups. Include questions about quality, customer service, and ways to increase customer satisfaction and productivity. Ask questions about anything that may be positively or negatively impacting employees and customers.

You will likely identify a large number of opportunities and challenges. If problems exist, you need to identify, understand and prioritize them, and take action. There is no simple solution. Identifying and addressing the top two or three problems is not enough, especially when there are many more problems that are impacting your employees and customers.

It is important to be thorough and objective job in analyzing the survey findings. It is then equally important to create a comprehensive action plan and to do a good job of getting everyone involved and executing the plan effectively. This requires communicating the results of surveys so that employees know that you listened to and heard them, and that you are committed to making needed changes based on their feedback.

Your objective should be to use your employee survey results to achieve large-scale increases in employee engagement and satisfaction, with a much greater focus on your customers and meeting or exceeding their expectations.

To ensure success, conduct employee attitude surveys annually in order to measure progress and to identify any new challenges and opportunities that surfaced since the previous employee survey. Your focus on and commitment to continuous improvement will ensure continued customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Once you start to achieve positive results with employees, you should also conduct customer surveys to assess customer satisfaction and to see how your customers feel about your company, your employees, your products and services and other key issues that drive customer satisfaction and retention. Don't be afraid to ask customers about things you know you are not doing well. You need to learn about how customers feel. Guessing isn't good enough. Your customers are probably also buying from your competitors. It is important that you learn first-hand how they compare your company, products and services with those of your competitors.

Taking good care of your employees, setting the right direction, providing good leadership, identifying problems and opportunities, taking action and measuring ongoing progress will enable your company to become more effective at attracting and retaining customers and to becoming more competitive and profitable.