Happy Employees Equal Good CRM

It's no secret that good customer relations starts from within, but a new report claims that companies with managers dedicated to strong employee relations will tend to have high customer loyalty and satisfaction as well. The report, published by consulting firm Arthur D. Little (ADL), examines management models that focus on building brand messaging from within the organization, starting with employees. Keeping employees informed of brand values helps them fulfill customer expectations and build business, the report says. "Relationships with employees were historically left to individual supervisors and managers," said Thomas Manning, director at ADL and author of the white paper, in a company statement. "Companies focused their training budgets on making better supervisors and managers in the hope they could universally and consistently promote and apply the merits of the company as an employer. That approach has met with a level of success that until now has been the benchmark for best practices. Today, however, there is a powerful new management model that is evolving for supporting the supervisor/employee relationship." According to the report, an effective employer/employee relationship will create various benefits, including lower employee training costs, higher levels of customer care and satisfaction, a positioning of the company as "the employer of choice" in its market, and enhanced synergy between a company's culture and the needs and desires of its employees. To translate these potential benefits into dollar figures, ADL gives the example of BankBoston. The bank found that a one percent improvement in employee commitment to customers could directly result in revenue increases of up to $11 million, and reduce hiring and training costs by about $15 million to $19 million in major departments.