How Engaged Employees Build Engaged Customers

Article first published as Engaged Employees Build Engaged Customers – How Does Advocate Help You Engage? on Technorati.

Engaged employees are one of an organization’s biggest assets. Great brands such as Southwest Airlines, Apple, and IBM have achieved their success in part by focusing on employees first, and customers second. When employees are engaged, they also tend to be happy and do what all people do: actively tell other people about what they are interested in. Engaged employees become brand advocates who reach out to and build engaged customers. They are using social media tools to do this in ever-increasing numbers, and customers are listening.

In other words, people trust other people, not brands.

Employees are a natural and more easily trusted bridge between your company and your customers. Who knows more about your brand than the people who work for it?

When you help your employees become engaged, they can then turn into positive and effective brand advocates. This is where the magic lies.

Think about all of the employees in your organization. Assume that most, if not all, of them are on some sort of social network at least daily. Assume that each of them has an average of 300 connections or influence points (Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Pinterest fans, etc.). Even a mid-sized company with 100 employees quickly has a team reach of 30,000 influence points. How does that compare to your actual brand’s fans or followers base? Typically, the total reach of a brand’s employees is at least 10x the brand’s own reach, and there is often very little overlap. And if you have more employees—or more active and connected ones—this number grows exponentially.

Engaged employees are twice as productive and they are responsible for up to 80% of of your customers’ overall brand satisfaction.

So why aren’t more organizations actively engaging their employees to be brand advocates? Often, it boils down to a foundation of disbelief and misunderstanding about the power of employee advocacy and the social media networks themselves. But after that, the main roadblocks are the concern that it takes too much time and there is no way to effectively manage this engagement. And for many years this was true. There were no comprehensive tools built to allow a brand to efficiently and effectively grow social engagement amongst its employees.

The Rise of Employee Advocacy Solutions

Luckily that is changing quickly. There are bright people out there who saw the problem, believed in the benefits of engaged employees, and built compelling solutions that give organizations a brilliant set of easy-to-use, highly effective, and completely measurable tools to empower and help build engaged employees and allow them to actively share their enthusiasm and your brands story to their social networks.

There are a growing number of amazing tools to engage and empower employees. Solutions such as Branderati, EveryoneSocial, and Addvocate are leading the charge. Now both the brand and employees can amplify content.

Employee Engagement + Customer Satisfaction = Financial Performance

Employees are absolutely crucial in building and improving customer relationships, but in order to make it scale they need governance, guidance, training, policies and processes, and effective tools. In addition, employee advocacy must be proactively managed and promoted – hoping it works does not cut it in today’s highly crowded social media fueled world.

Tools like Addvocate, Branderati, and EveryoneSocial can help your company more effectively manage at least this aspect of engaging your employees and building brand trust and relevance. What you do with it is up to you. But remember your employees and customers are already actively talking about your brand on social media, with or without you.

With solutions like these there is no longer a valid excuse to not build engaged employees. Join the revolution and actively engage your employees. Your bottom line will thank you.