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Customer, Client and Employee Loyalty

 For successful business people it is common practice to focus on acquiring loyalty from customers and clients by adding value with the products and services offered….however, how often do you add value as a customer? Are you in the habit of making sure you are someone’s best customer when you do business with them?

For example, my hairdresser agreed to come into her salon to cut my hair on her day off because that was the only time I had a free couple of hours….I pay a discounted price for having my hair cut at her salon and have never tipped her so while my hair was being washed, I pondered over why she was so loyal to me. Didn’t take long to figure it out….she was very concerned about the disloyalty and betrayals she had recently faced from her employees at the salon poaching her clients by offering to cut their hair at home. She wanted our light banter while she was drying my hair to include some essential business coaching J I tried to put a plaster on the wounds by reminding her of the spiritual principle “nothing that is yours can ever be taken away from you and nobody can give you anything that isn’t yours” but I knew that this concept would just calm her temporarily….what she really needed was to discover the success strategies that work practically in ensuring employee loyalty.  

In coaching, we look at a business that works very successfully in order to see what is done differently from a business that doesn’t work so well so that the latter can adopt the strategies of the former. One of my most successful business friends is Grant Leboff of Phone Intelligence www.phoneintelligence.com . I have been a teacher for over 20 years and can easily recognise an “A” grade student by their demeanour and a successful entrepreneur by their style of communication. Grant Leboff fits into both those categories so I thought it would be useful to identify how he achieves employee loyalty:

“If you expect the best out of people, that’s what they will give you and if you keep having to pull rank with people, perhaps they shouldn’t really be working with you” he suggested. A wise perspective which he combined with the strategy of making the employees feel part of a team, contributing to the larger picture, rather than a group of individuals. It was easy to see that this team spirit was missing from the hairdressing salon where all the workers, including the salon owner operated under the role of individual  “technicians” with no-one nurturing the entrepreneurial vision and team spirit that would keep the business alive and flourishing.

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