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.