A recent study found that 43% of consumers who stop doing business with a company do so because of poor service. 77% of those people who left did so because the employees had bad attitudes. And 83% of those people told others all about their horrible experiences. What is startling is that this could be your company – but not Enterprise Rent-a-Car.

This award-winning company works hard to develop customer loyalty and build lifetime customers. In fact, their nationally recognized management training program has been noted by Business Week as one of the best places to launch a career.

With me today to talk about their employee selection and training programs and how they impact customer loyalty was corporate recruiting manager Pam Webster. She’s been with Enterprise for more than 23 years – a testament to the kind of company she works for.

The real take away from this program is what I felt were some key indicators to how their employee training works to foster high levels of customer loyalty. First, each of their values reflects the importance of the customer. Second, their values and mission are regularly and constantly at the forefront of their employee interactions. Third, top management is involved regularly at the staff level in mentoring and reinforcing the values. And fourth, they have an employment brand – a specific profile of the type of employees they want and they recruit to that profile.

Every expert and growing company I've talked with in the past three years on this show will agree that Enterprise has a program that works. If you want to increase customer loyalty, you have to start with employee satisfaction and your company culture. The two are intrinsically linked together, and you can't have one without the other.

Posted by David Kinard at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a lot that goes into customer experience. But for sure, everyone agrees that employee satisfaction is at the core. Without engaged employees, the delivery of an intentional experience is likely not to happen.

So, it’s been noted that the number one reason a customer stops doing business with a company is due to that company’s indifferent attitude. What causes that? Unhappy employees is likely the number one culprit. And, it’s been often said that employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers. So, is there a link between your management style, your employee’s engagement, and your customer’s experience? I think a case can be made for this and today we explored it a bit further.

With me was Rick Garlick, he’s director of strategic consulting for Maritz Research. Maritz recently conducted a national study of 1000 employees to better understand the qualities of both effective and ineffective managers. Today's show talked about each of the six types of managers the study identified, and how each relates to customer satisfaction because of how the manager manages their employees.

One thing that stood out to me as a critical issue is that managers or executives -- even companies -- expect their customer interactions to be better/more meaningful than what exists within the organization itself. Said another way, you want something you're not modeling. This is a huge opportunity with only 1/2 of managers being identified as "effective", but only 26% as being emotionally effective in engaging employees who then are motivated to positively engage their customers.

This was a great show today and something that we as managers, or manager of managers, need to better understand -- how our management and leadership styles directly affect and trickle down to the experiences our customers have. The next thing I'd like to see from Maritz is the manager study to see how many would self-identify their style into one of the six, and then someone should take some follow up initiative and create an education/training program to move us all to the Caring Mentor style -- which, according to my guest today -- is the ideal and has no negative customer experience impact.

Posted by David Kinard at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The only way you’ve escaped the whole conversation around marketing ROI is if you’re head has been in the ground, or you were abducted by aliens for the last five years. And right alongside the whole conversation about how to track ROI is another conversation about marketing dashboards – those handy dandy thingamabobs that are supposed to tell you just how well your marketing is performing.

But while we can all talk about the importance of marketing ROI and their corresponding dashboards, very few marketers are actually tracking their ROI in a way that’s meaningful to their CFO. And even fewer have marketing dashboards that provide real time data enabling strategic and tactical choices to be made.

With me today to help figure out how to identify marketing ROI and create a dashboard that gives useful data was Alex Eldemir, partner with MarketingNPV. Alex believes a well-constructed dashboard should play a dual role today we talked about what those roles are.

One thing Alex mentioned was that marketing depts are in a state of evolution. Some are still money pit publishing houses, others take on the mantle of brand policing, and the final group are really growth drivers. It's in that last category that marketers are seen as growth drivers of a company, not just expensive line item spenders.

Alex and his business Partner Pat LaPointe are conducting three workshops with the American Marketing Association. They'll be held in October, November, and December at various parts of the country. More info about Marketing Resource Allocation: Using Measurement, Analytics, and Dashboards to Link Spending to Financial Outcomes is here.

Marketers, if we want to be seen as credible players at the strategy table, and NOT be seen as just willy-nilly spenders, we have got to be well-versed in ROI, dashboards, and the whole discussion around how marketing is contributing to the profitability of the company -- and do it in a way that is meaningful and acceptable to the CFO, CEO, and board. So, listen to today's show, go to the workshop, and learn how to do this!

Posted by David Kinard at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)