Customers won’t necessarily
come back to you just because you sell BMWs.
It’s a lesson Steve Lamfrom
has learned from 35 years as
the principal owner of $45 million A&L Motor Sales, a company his father founded in 1948.
Your products and brand are
important, but unless you
develop great relationships with
your customers, you’re missing
the most important ingredient
of success.
Lamfrom says that your customers come to you and pay for
your products or services in
order to be taken care of, and
they need to have as much confidence in the people behind the
product as they do in the product itself.
As a leader, taking care of
your customers starts with taking care of your employees;
once you’ve provided employees with what they need to succeed, they will be more able
and willing to provide top-notch customer service.
Smart Business spoke with
Lamfrom about why customer
satisfaction begins with
employee satisfaction and how
to satisfy your employees.
Remember where customer satisfaction starts. The main thing to
remember is that if you don’t
have good customer satisfaction, it’s because you don’t have
good employee satisfaction. It’s
most important to recognize
what your employees need and
satisfy their needs because if
you can satisfy employees’
needs, they’re going to satisfy
the customers’ needs.
How do you do that? The best
thing is to listen. To give you an
example, we just remodeled our
showroom, and we also remodeled the employees’ lounge and
restroom at the same time.
That’s something which stemmed from a desire to keep our
employees satisfied with the
work environment here.
If you don’t actively engage
your employees and meet their
needs, you are going to lose
your customers, no question,
because it’s all about relationships in business. My relationship with my employees is
reflected in my employees’ relationships with our customers.
If your employees can’t or
don’t want to be at work, they
won’t have the ability to take
care of that customer. Ideally,
we want to eliminate all our
turnover. We recognize how
expensive it is to have turnover,
to hire and train new people.
In business, it’s tough to get
good people. In the auto sales
industry, we probably have the
highest turnover in terms of
salespeople. Our average salesman has been here for just over
a year, and that’s not a great
number.
Find out what employees want. We ask them what they need.
As long as it’s not excessive —
like wanting three weeks of
vacation when they’re only
entitled to two weeks — we work with that. We recognize
the employees need their time.
At the same time, when
we’re short-handed, we’ll recognize when someone has to
put in six days or 60 hours a
week. In other words, you
have to give 100 percent to get
100 percent.
You can’t give everything
everybody wants all the time.
It’s sort of like bringing up
your kids. You want to give
them what they want, but you
can’t give them everything.
You just have to listen to
what the employees want and
need. If someone’s car breaks
down and they can’t make it in
to work, we might give them a
car to use for a week.
Everything is not black and
white and by the rule book because the world is changing.
The whole idea of meeting the
needs of employees is a give-and-take. For instance, people
like their weekends off, but
weekends are when a lot of
people like to buy cars. So we
might try to be flexible with
scheduling, but someone
might need to take a day off
during the week so they can
work a weekend day.