Customer or Employees?

By Willem Van Der Merwe

One of my favourite questions to ask a business owner is who is more important, your customers or your employees? 

Now, some of them will of course say they're both equally important, but I don't let them get away with that. I challenge them to pick one, and many of them will choose the customer. They say the customer pays our salaries, or they'll say, without our customers, we have no business. And both of those are true. 

Hidden in there is the thinking, customers are more important, I can always find new employees, and I beg you to challenge that. My view is that employees are more important than customers. My reasoning though is that unless your employees are happy, unless they're motivated and engaged, they're not going to take care of your customers the way that you want them to and the task of building a loyal customer base falls on squarely on your shoulders, OK, but you could only do so much yourself.

For a business to scale, customer success needs to be everyone's job. And in my view, happy employees lead to happy customers. I like to borrow Liz Weisman's term “multipliers”. When I think about happy employees, they are employees who feel valued and are engaged in the business, this will turn them into your best customer ambassadors. They multiply the kind of experience that you want your customers to receive. And that is the the value of engaged employees, that's what will create loyal customers.

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