The real reason companies should put employees—not customers—first

Fast Company

a day ago

I once worked for a client who hired our agency to help them solve what they considered to be their biggest brand-related challenge—poor customer experience, which had them losing contracts. During our first meeting at the client's building, my direct contact gave me a tour of every corner of the office, explaining what each department was responsible for and introducing me to key players in the business.
At a pause in the tour, she stopped in front of a large poster hanging from the wall, pointed at it dramatically, and said, 'This is the cause of all of our problems.'
The poster was bright and well-designed. In bold letters, it proclaimed: 'Around here, the customer always comes first!' The poster was meant to be a motivational reminder about the importance of treating customers well—but it clearly had some unintended consequences.
The unintended consequences of putting customers first
'All of the employees working here feel like their opinions don't matter and that their needs will always be put last, even if the customer is wrong or being unreasonable in their demands,' my contact told us.
The poster, of course, was not the problem. The problem was how it made employees feel—like second-class citizens in their own workplace. She went into detail about the culture of the company, the low morale among the team, and how employees had no real love for the organization or its customers. As it turns out, poor customer service was not the company's biggest brand-related challenge. It was a symptom of a much greater problem—that of poor employee engagement.
Somewhat paradoxically, because the company had a culture of putting the needs of customers first, they actually made their customer experience worse. Why? Because the employees who were tasked with providing remarkable customer experience were themselves having a poor experience in their workplace.
How your employees feel is how your customers will feel
'The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel,' writes workplace facilitator and author Sybil Stershic. 'And if your employees don't feel valued, neither will your customers.' By promoting a culture where customers always come first, the company had worsened its level of customer experience. The company's employees didn't feel valued and, as a result, neither did its customers.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson puts it a different way: 'Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.'
Building a customer-centric business is an honorable and noble endeavor. After all, happy customers are the reason that the lights stay on in any business. But building a customer-centric business at the expense of employees' happiness, mental health, work-life balance, and overall needs can only lead to mediocrity in the workplace.
The benefits of putting employees first
There's clear evidence that putting customers first by prioritizing company culture, employee engagement, and the overall employee experience has a sweep of benefits, too. Research has shown that:
Organizations that score in the top 25% on employee experience receive double the return on sales of organizations in the bottom 25%.
More than 80% of workers at companies that perform well financially are either highly or moderately engaged—compared to just 68% at low-performing companies.
Organizations with highly engaged employees also get a higher return on investment per employee, with highly engaged employees responsible for an increase of 26% of revenue per employee, along with 13% greater returns to shareholders.
Clearly, the level of engagement in your organization has a real and meaningful impact on your bottom line. If you want to build a highly successful company, you can't sacrifice employee engagement in pursuit of customer satisfaction—no matter how noble that pursuit may be.
Yes, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are both critical to the success of your business, but the order in which you pursue these two important elements matters. The most effective path to having satisfied customers is to first have satisfied employees. When employees feel respected, trusted, and valued, they will pass on these sentiments to customers, leading to the type of remarkable customer experience that turns casual consumers into raving (and paying) fans of the brand. But when they feel disrespected, mistrusted, or undervalued because you put customers' needs ahead of theirs, you can be pretty confident that your customer experience will worsen, not improve.
If you're not satisfied with the level of customer experience that your employees are delivering, try rearranging your priorities by first focusing on happier employees. You may just find that the level of your customer experience will improve organically.