Grace under fire.

What is the best asset you offer your customers? What is the best way to keep your customers? If you answered your staff on both accounts, you are correct. If you answered your technology, your product or even yourself, you are missing the point completely.

All recent surveys show the difficulty in attracting and keeping staff post GFC and yet companies continue to abuse the most important relationship they have. My staff give great service is a real throwaway line, unless you can show your customer absolute return on their money using great staff to accomplish this.

It’s hard enough to find great employees, let alone hang onto them and once you have, to imbue them with a sense of the culture you want to showcase to your customers. This is something that needs to come from the top down and the bottom up so there is a true meeting in the middle and agreement on the service excellence your company intends to provide. Without staff engagement of your brand and culture you have nothing to offer.

Your front line staff is under constant pressure to deliver your message, your culture, your product and your service levels all to the highest standards achievable. All to try and keep your customer for a lifetime. A lifetime that is not a fixed value but a moving target that can increase the more you create a positive engagement and emotional interaction between your employees and your customer. As Brad Miller of Litmus Group says, “everyone wants a relationship with their customer because this is the mythical thing that can make sure that we stay in business”.

The only way the above, will happen is via your employees. Do your people tell your story, your brand or do you look to outsource your most prized asset and only work on bottom line?

Seth Godin says, “That companies that race to the bottom in terms of the skill or cost of their labour end up with nothing but low margins. The few companies that are able to race to the top, that can challenge workers to bring their whole selves, their human selves, to work, on the other hand, can earn stability and growth and margins”. As it gets more difficult to find staff aligned to your thinking and objectives, it becomes imperative employers do all they can to hang onto staff and not take them for granted in any way.

If you can do that, then your staff will bring grace, skill and motivation everyday and you might even make some money.