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.