Reputation vs Employee Investment

The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement recently came out with a whitepaper titled “ What Drives the Customer Experiences in Service Marketing ?” in it they discuss how the “brand” of a company many not necessarily be associated with the literal brand itself, but of a combination of the company AND its employees. In other words, standard marketing measurements such as customer loyalty and customer satisfaction may not be telling the entire story of the customer’s experience.

The Forum decided to look at insurance companies for their study. Insurance companies not only have a number of different brands, but they also had two qualities that the researchers decided would make them a good subject: Customer loyalty is weak, since insurance choices are primarily based on price/coverage. These types of companies expect to lose customers even if they have excellent satisfaction scores, so “product differences” between companies shouldn’t play much of a role in retention.

Customers connect directly with a single insurance agent, ensuring their experiences with the people of the company are limited to a single individual (rather than a team that may different levels of experience. Because insurance is such a mechanical and forced act, the only way a customer is likely to stick around with the same insurance company is if they have good experiences with the people they interact with, because very few customers will be loyal to the company itself. The Forum sent out three separate surveys to conduct their research.

They collected data from the following survey types: Customer Satisfaction Surveys – These surveys were designed to indicate overall customer satisfaction with the company itself. Employee Performance Surveys – These surveys were designed to indicate overall satisfaction with the insurance agent. Employee Engagement Surveys – These surveys were designed to indicate the engagement the agent had with the customer directly.

The goal is to compare the satisfaction score between the company and the employee representative of the company to see if there are any differences. They also wanted to follow that up with more information on the effects of people with regard to customer satisfaction.

Overall, the mean scores for employee performance were higher than the scores for company satisfaction, indicating that individuals that represent the “face of the company” are able to develop a different, often better relationship with the customer than the company itself. In addition, the employees that were more engaged with the customers (with good customer service skills) had not only higher satisfaction scores, but also higher retention rates and account growth.