Happy employees DO mean happy customers – the evidence
Does the adage of happy staff equals happy customers hold any weight? Is there any evidence to show the connection between engaged employees and satisfied customers?
That is one of the questions I have been asked again and again over many years.
And, yes, it is hard to demonstrate conclusively. But, in the last 10-15 years, I and colleagues at Ipsos / Karian and Box have undertaken studies for a number of businesses that does show a strong connection.
These were studies undertaken in the insurance, banking and retail industries. While specific to these sectors, the lessons are likely to be universal. They all involved assessing data for multiple teams, and the related customer satisfaction feedback provided to those teams.
Most directly, retail stores provide a very specific connection. Individual stores receive feedback and, so, we can see how by having employees who are more engaged can translate into a customer’s experience.
Back in mid 2010s, I and colleagues assessed data from over 9,000 stores for one large UK-based retailer. To see if and where any connections existed, we undertook analysis of a range of employee metrics for those stores, together with related customer satisfaction measures.
What did the analysis show?
Put simply, the more engaged the teams were, the better the scores for several customer service indicators – including overall shopping experience and customer perceptions of friendly, helpful staff.
The below chart shows just one of the analysis outputs that identified a boost of 1.5 in positive customer feedback between the least engagement teams (bottom decile) and most engaged ones – a nearly 20%pt uplift in customer satisfaction across the 9,000 stores.
That wasn’t all. Stores with more engaged employees also had much lower levels of sickness absence AND had much higher average sales per store.
You could argue that this was a one off. After all, it was simply one supermarket’s data we assessed. But, since that study we have seen similar, strong connections between employee engagement levels and customer satisfaction at a range of other grocery chains.
Put simply, the data backs up the theory and assumptions.
Make sure you have happy employees - motivated ones who come into work wanting to do their best, with a smile on their face - if you want your customers to come back, again and again, spend money and go away happy too.