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Do Your Customers Trust You?

Customers are affected by employee turnover

To truly understand the financial impact of employee turnover in reference to your paying customers you must be able to think like a customer. After all, you're a customer, right? I'm going to take you inside the customers' mind with some specific examples. You must think about each example and adapt them to your own business, whether you have one or hundreds of employees. As a customer yourself, how would you feel?

In a recent column I discussed some ways "employee turnover" effects your internal customers (employees). In this column I'm going to discuss some ways that turnover effects your external customers (paying customers).

ATTITUDE
Attitude is THE make or break ingredient in all businesses. You now know, that you're internal customers attitude is seriously effected by turnover, due to the lack of attention, recognition and training. After all, how could you be there for them to insure quality control when all your time is spent staying on top of the "recruitment process"? This reminds me of an article I once read and I quote... "If we didn't have any turnover, I'd be out of a job." Scary, but true for some of us.

Once you have a team or even one individual with a negative attitude regardless of the reason, it spreads like a cancer. The rest of your team catches this incurable disease quickly. Once this happens, all of your recruiting efforts are counter productive because the new people you hire also catch the disease. You probably don't even realize it, because you're so busy with the "recruitment process". Ask yourself, how many new employees do you lose because of bad attitudes? How many potential interviews do you lose because of the reputation your turnover has created? Most team members won't even share this information with you because they feel like they're complaining or squealing.

Once this dreaded disease has been imbedded in your employees it then spreads to your paying customers. Here's how. The customer calls on the phone, and your employee is extremely negative, condescending, not unsympathetic, etc. The customers standing at the counter overhears the telephone call and get a taste for what's ahead. The employee that helps the customers at the counter has a bad attitude and all the customers waiting in line can see it. The body language from the employee is clear, they just don't want to be there. Customers translate that into, they don't care about me, my business is not important enough to them and some even go so far as to think… maybe their newspaper isn't for me, maybe their services aren't so good, maybe the rates are too high, they probably won't even be able to give me the results I need.

You see customers feel that if you don't care enough about where you work to look and act professional, then you don't care enough about following procedure and therefore you don't care about me, the customer, so I the customer don't really trust you or your service or product anymore.

Disgruntled customers are sometimes created by the attitudes of your employees. Customers like to watch how other customers are being handled. It gives them an idea of what's ahead for them. If they're witnessing poor service, by the time it's their turn they too may have a bad attitude. When you mix an employees bad attitude with a bad attitude from a customer, well you then have a feud on display for all to see. It doesn't stop there! Have you ever heard the quote "one bad customer tells 9 other people about the bad service experience"? I'm sure by now you will agree with that quote. This is a very old quote, I happen to think it goes way beyond 9 other people. And now with the speed of the internet, one bad complaint is just an email away.

I'm going to give you an example of a positive experience I have with a small family run business. While this is not a newspaper, you'll get the idea relating to service. It's a café I frequent for breakfast. There are a couple of reasons I like this restaurant. The food is great and there's no skimping on portions. However, there are few things I don't like. They allow smoking (in the smoking section), the decorating needs some improvement, like new seat covers and curtains for a start. So, why do I go there if they allow smoking and the decor needs work?

What keeps me going back are the people. No matter how busy they are, they always give 100% service. They're always smiling and polite and you never hear them talking about how tired they are, overworked or how they can't wait to get out of there. If the food were just average and cost a bit more, I'd still go, because they treat me like I'm special. I go there to relax and read the paper while I'm waited on. They welcome me each and every time. They always have the same people working there with an occasional new employee. Good attitudes and smiles are worth doing business with over and over again.

Good service experiences like this make you feel like they have a good business, they're in control, organized and they know what they're doing. They must treat they're internal customers (employees) good and deliver only the best food with no short cuts.

Have I told other people about my positive experience, YES! Hundreds!

Statistics show that the paying customer will pay an average of 10% price premium for service.

So I ask you. Do your customers trust you; do they believe that you'll do what you say you'll do? Remember that the goal is to satisfy every customer. The customer is king!