A Simply Strategy For Services Growth

The June issue of Harvard Business Review reports on research by Gary Davies and Rosa Chun, professors at the Manchester Business School, that confirms a simple strategy for driving growth in service organizations: sell your staff and they will sell your customers.

Davies and Chun set out to follow up on the ideas in their 2003 book Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness. If your company's reputation among customers is vital to your success in the market, how do you best influence this perception? They found that when a company's service employees thought more highly of the organization than customers, customer perception and sales rose. When a company's service employees thought less of the organization than customers, customer perception and sales fell.

The researchers get into the reasons for this, a phenomenon called emotional contagion. This means that a service person's feelings are inevitably transmitted to customers through all sorts of cues. Customers absorb these emotional signals and are influenced to feel the same way.

This means marketing needs to turn its attention internally. More importantly, management needs to focus on demonstrating to staff that theirs is a great company, on an ongoing basis. All too often, companies focus on what customers think and then do all sorts of things, mainly led by marketing, to change their views. But in services organizations, customer views trend towards staff views. So if you want to sell your customers, sell your staff. Perpetually.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

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