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Increase Customer Loyalty By Treating Employees Better

Increase Customer Loyalty By Treating Employees Better
by Fabrizio Moreira

Your employees are your company's best asset. Treat them well.

If you want a more loyal customer base, treat your employees better. It’s simple as that. Many business owners think the customers are their greatest asset, but the truth is your employees are your best asset in any endeavor.

Your employees are your greatest cheerleaders or your greatest detractors. They’re in the trenches for you each and every day. If they feel valued, trusted and that they are contributing personally to your business, they’re going to eagerly tell all their friends and family, even total strangers. But, if they feel used, put upon, ignored or not trusted by the company leadership, they’re going to hate coming to work every day, their production will be down, and they’re aren’t going to tell their friends, family and perfect strangers about where they work. Or if they do, it’s not going to be flattering.

When a company loses a valued employee, especially a high-placed employee such as in management, the cost of replacing such a person will be from 70 to 200 percent of that employee’s annual salary. Not only that, but when they leave, all their institutional knowledge and memory/history goes with them. And you have to find a way to recover that information in the ones who remain. And if some customers follow that employee to the new job, the company loses revenue.

In the world of retail, the average turnover in stores dances between 40 to 60 percent per year. That’s crazy. The costs of constantly retraining new employees combined with the costs of the mistakes they make that result in markdowns and damaged products, are unacceptable.

If the Golden Rule of business is the “Customer is always right,” the Platinum Rule of business is “Treat your employees the way you want them to treat your best customer.” Simply put, the better you treat your employees, the better they’ll treat your customers.

Read full article on Business.