Correlation between Employee Loyalty & Customer Loyalty
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Dec 26, 2008
Walker Information, Vovici's partner for employee loyalty benchmarking, has done detailed annual studies looking at customer loyalty and employee loyalty. When Walker compiles its U.S. benchmarks, it finds that both types of loyalty move in parallel to one another, tracking each other for increases and declines:
While correlation alone does not necessarily imply never implies causation, Walker has found that high-risk employees provide poorer customer service than loyal employees: a sure way for employee disloyalty to lead to customer disloyalty. As I wrote last week:
If you don't take care of your employees, they won't take care of your customers. Loyal employees have a positive impact on customer loyalty and retention: where 92% of loyal employees do tasks for customers "above and beyond the call of duty", only 54% of trapped and high risk employees do so, according to Walker. Where 89% of loyal employees help coworkers who have heavy workloads, only 60% of trapped or high-risk employees do. In a recession, of course, it is more important than ever to keep existing customers loyal, because the cost of acquiring new customers is so high.
This is Reason #1 of the top five reasons to measure employee loyalty during a recession. Make sure to review them all.