Dive Brief:
- Employees are growing more detached from their work, which can threaten customer satisfaction. Just over one-quarter — 28% — say they are extremely proud of the products or services their organization offers, according to a Gallup survey of nearly 21,000 employees released last month.
- Employee pride has fallen since 2020 when 36% of employees said they were proud of their organization’s products or services. And it’s not just employee pride; more employees are looking for new jobs, indicating a disconnect from employees and their work, said Andy Kemp, research associate at Gallup.
- “It's an area of concern,” Kemp said. “We're seeing this employee pride sort of hold us back from everywhere we could be” with customer satisfaction.
Dive Insight:
When employees feel disconnected from their work, that can spell trouble for customer satisfaction.
“For frontline employees, if they're not really into what they're doing, if they're not proud of it, if it's not something they can show enthusiasm around, that's obviously going to rub off into their interactions with customers,” Kemp said. “Customers can feel and sense that.”
Despite the decrease in employee pride, customer satisfaction has grown since the pandemic by some measures.
Gallup attributes the increase in customer satisfaction to the increase in product availability after the pandemic. Employee detachment, however, acts as “a ceiling” for customer satisfaction growth, Kemp said.
“We can see a direct correlation between how teams and employees respond to this employee pride question and then their customer satisfaction and customer retention metrics,” Kemp said.
One answer to combating employee detachment is developing a culture of customer centricity.
“The solution to this isn't something that's very convoluted and complex,” Kemp said. “It's really just having that layer of intentionality here and just talking about customers more often.”
Employees who said that their organizations factor customer feedback into decision-making and put customers at the center of conversation are 4.5 times as likely to say they are extremely proud of the products or services their organization offers, Gallup found. They are also twice as likely to report improvements in the quality, availability and affordability of their organization’s products and services in the past year.
“It's sort of a compounding effect, where their employees are going to be prouder of their work and the services they provide, but also they're going to be more connected to the mission of their organization,” Kemp said.
