Employee vs Company Loyalty

Customer satisfaction surveys and customer loyalty surveys are both designed to measure how current customers and clients view the company. For market researchers, this information helps decide the effectiveness of various customer service campaigns, product branding, etc.

However, recent research has suggested that an area that many companies are missing with their research is individual employee loyalty. In essence, even if a customer does not rate the company high in customer satisfaction scores, they may rate an employee high. This makes some logical sense, and it can be illustrated with two personal stories.

Starbucks In general, I prefer to go to small coffee shops because they provide a more personal experience and more interesting coffee varieties. Yet one day I walked into a Starbucks and had an excellent customer service experience with a Barista that was friendly and engaging. So I started going into that Starbucks more often with the hope of running into the Barista.

Grocery Chain There are two grocery stores near my house. Both are generally interchangeable and neither would receive very high marks from me in terms of company satisfaction. I used to switch back and forth between both depending on my mood.

At some point though I began frequenting only one grocery store, primarily because there were several excellent checkers that help me get through the line quickly and remember my name. Their customer service keeps me coming to the one grocery store, even though I wouldn’t give the company itself high customer satisfaction scores or even high customer loyalty scores, because without those cashiers I would be less likely to frequent that grocery store over the other one.

Many people have examples of how a great employee can create customer loyalty in a way that may not be measured in the company’s satisfaction scores, because the company itself is not what is keeping the customer coming back – it is their experience with a particular employee. Similarly, there are great companies where one bad employee can cause the individual to avoid the store as much as possible. It may be important to remember this when you conduct your satisfaction surveys and analyze the results.

Satisfaction surveys may not always be telling the entire story. It may be important to also have several different employee satisfaction measures, because there may be an opportunity your company is missing if it doesn’t recognize employee contributions.