By Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano

How many customers are satisfied with you and your company? How many of those customers are engaged? How do great salespeople develop engaged customers?

Even if you could honestly say that all of your customers are extremely satisfied, you might not be doing a good enough job. Gallup’s research demonstrates that customer satisfaction is merely the foundation for a continuing relationship with customers. As a result, “satisfaction” is an unreliable standard for gauging the strength of your relationships with customers. Customer satisfaction is simply the entry point for achieving a deeper foundation that rests on total customer engagement.

One of a company’s most important assets is its customer base. Taking a closer look, we find that engaged customers are the most valuable part of that asset. Therefore, your real value as a salesperson is not just generating sales, but generating loyal, engaged customers. The payoff for companies is enormous: A base of engaged customers assures sustained, profitable growth—predictably. The payoff for you can be enormous as well. Engaged customers become advocates for you and what you sell. Business with such customers is often made at higher margins. And, engaged customers often help you sell other accounts.

Your real value as a salesperson is not just generating sales, but generating loyal, engaged customers.

What leads to customer engagement? Is it products, marketing, service, follow-up? Well, yes, all of those. But what most contributes to customer engagement is how customers feel about their interactions with you and the other people at your organization. These interactions should result in customers becoming more confident, gaining a greater sense of you and your company’s integrity, developing pride in doing business with you, and—if you do your job well—developing a passion for your products and brand.

This notion of customer engagement is a quantum leap from many of our long-held beliefs about what good client relationships are like.

Customer satisfaction

In the late 1970s the two buzzwords sweeping through the emerging global business community were “quality” and “customer satisfaction.” Many old-line companies were taking a beating from newer rivals. U.S. car manufacturers were getting killed by the likes of Toyota and Honda. Poor quality and a lack of customer satisfaction were considered the causes for much of the drubbing.

This situation sparked intense interest in the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement and ushered in an era of increased attention to customer satisfaction. True enough, customer dissatisfaction has always been a surefire way to lose business. But simply attaining a high level of customer satisfaction does not seem to guarantee the customer’s business. This is because you and your competitor usually will have very close customer satisfaction ratings. Customer loyalty represents strength in customer relationships that extends well beyond mere satisfaction. To uncover the factors that build these sorts of loyal customer relationships, several of our colleagues at Gallup collected data from different industries. They looked at the factors that cause customers to stop wanting to buy products from a supplier, and the factors most likely to cause them to continue to buy.

Not surprisingly, they discovered that in most industries the No. 1 reason customers stop buying particular products is dissatisfaction with product performance. Customers were particularly severe when they felt the company had failed to meet their most basic expectations. Those expectations are much defined by the promise the brand communicates about its product or service.

Most of us could have guessed that when a customer buys a product and it doesn’t work, that customer is likely to go elsewhere. What was surprising to us was that when companies met their customers’ product expectations, there was still no guarantee the customer would continue using that company as a supplier. Freedom from defects is a minimum requirement, rather than an assurance of repeat purchases. So the question is, what can assure that customers will keep coming back for more?

The research showed that products receiving high ratings for quality were more likely to obtain higher levels of repurchase, and that’s not surprising. However, the effect of product quality alone often paled in comparison to the power of human interaction: Customers who felt strongly positive about their sales representatives were as much as 12 times more likely to continue repurchasing the product.

One of the other surprises in these data is that price in most cases was not a significant driver of repurchase intentions. While it certainly can be a factor in the original purchasing decision, companies don’t develop loyal customers based on price alone. Loyal or engaged customers have an attachment that extends far beyond “getting a good deal.”

In their research, Gallup found that in addition to questions about satisfaction and the willingness to recommend or repurchase, there was a great deal of evidence that an emotional connection or “attachment” was important. Their findings show that customer engagement is not a simple function of economics; it is personal and emotional. No wonder people play a more important role in this process than the product.

While brand and product awareness, image and reputation contribute to building a base of customers, people are often the most powerful generators of customer engagement. Since Gallup researchers have found that customer engagement leads to sustainable growth and enhanced profits, those sales reps and other customer-facing employees who can generate customer engagement are worth their weight in gold.

Discover Your Sales Strengths

Excerpted from Discover Your Sales Strengths

Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano are consultants, speakers and authors for The Gallup Organization. For more sales management insights from Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano, visit the Gallup Management Journal at http://gmj.gallup.com/.

Copyright © 2003 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, N.J. All rights reserved.
Gallup®, A8™, CE11™, Gallup Management Journal®, GMJ®, I10™, L3™, Q12®, SE25™, SRI®, The Gallup Path™, The Gallup Poll®, StrengthsFinder®, and the 34 StrengthsFinder theme names are trademarks of The Gallup Organization. These materials are provided for noncommercial, personal use only. Reproduction prohibited without the express permission of The Gallup Organization

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