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'It's the employees, stupid!'

A few short years ago, American voters elected a president based in large part on a simple statement: "It's the economy, stupid!" The slogan was quite instrumental in catapulting the candidate to the highest office in the land.

I was reminded of this slogan a few weeks ago while visiting with Juliet Williams, CEO of Strategic Management Resources in Devonshire, U.K.

A few years ago, Juliet reported that through her work with more than 130 companies worldwide, she had found: "...up to 40% of an organization's marketing and communication dollars can either be wasted or destroyed when the internal marketing and communications programs don't support or align with the external marketing and communication programs."

In our visit, Juliet confirmed that the problem has not improved. In fact, it has gotten worse. Her research now includes more than 170 companies, and it appears that almost half of the marketing communities studied either wasted or fails to deliver value to the organization, if employees do not support the external marketing programs.

The problem is, the organization promises, "fast, friendly service." Then the customer experience, primarily through employee contact, is "slow, surly, with lack of understanding of customer needs and requests." Pure and simple, those are wasted marketing and communication investments. Worst of all, those experiences become lost customers and prospects. In Juliet's research, much of the success of a marketing communications program depends on employee support and employee delivery.

In short, to paraphrase the politician, "It's the employees, stupid!"

Every manager knows getting employees to be customer-focused and service-oriented is crucial to long-term success. Much of the success of Nordstrom's FedEx, Ritz-Carlton, USAA(the insurance company in San Antonio) and other organizations comes from enthusiastic, customer-oriented employees who deliver service and experiences that not only keep customers coming back, but turn them into advocates for the organization and the brand.

But most organizations do little to prepare or help employees become customer-focused. Yes, they send out memos. They hold meetings. They pass out buttons and hand banners. They cajole and plead and sometimes even reward employees for delivering good customer service. In most cases, however, they do little to help employees understand why being customer-focused is important; why customer retention is critical; why delivering on the brand promise is vital. In short, they preach to employees, but they don't prepare them.

Developing a customer-focused organization is not a marketing task, it's a management task. Top managers are the only ones who can provide the resources, facilities, information and, yes, even the tools to create customer-centric organizations. So, although the problem may be created by managers who don't understand that, "It's the employees, stupid!" it may well be that it is simply stupid management that is creating the problem.

The real key to building a customer-oriented organization starts with knowledge --- customer knowledge and lots of it. This includes knowledge of customers' relationship with the organization, their current value, their potential, their wants, needs, desires, and on and on. From an employee's point of view, you can't be customer-oriented if you don't know anything about customers. That's where management comes in.

Top management must provide the tools and the information for employees to truly know and understand customers. To many managers, this means lots of high-tech, whiz-bang technology, such as on-line systems, interactive resources, pull-down windows and the like.

But customer knowledge need not depend on the latest technology. It depends on making what already is known about customers and prospects inside the organization available to the people who touch, interact with and relate to them every day. In other words, customer knowledge can be passed around by sharing what the organization already knows, or making what is inherent in customer relationships available to the people who need to know.

The academic community is beginning to recognize the need to relate internal customer orientation to organizational market orientation. That is based on the notion that employees are both a supplier and a customer to other employees within the organization. Thus, the organization likely needs both an external marketing and communication program and an internal one.

At a recent American Marketing Association consortium meeting in Vienna, Professors Felix T. Mavondo and Jodie Conduit, both of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, presented their research of Australian companies on "How Critical Is Internal Customer Orientation to Market Orientation?" Using variables such as internal marketing processes, training, management support, internal communication, personnel management and involvement in external communication, Mavondo and Conduit demonstrated that internal customers (employees) are very important to the external market orientation of the firm.

To me, it is becoming increasingly clear: Employees enhance or destroy the value of marketing and communication programs delivered to external customers. Employees are customers of the marketing organization. Management's responsibility is to empower, if not emancipate, employees to become customer-focused and customer service providers. And to do that, management must provide the tools and resources that allow employees to become customer-intimate.

In short, it is the employees stupid, who make marketing and communication successful. The potential shouldn't be determined by stupid management that doesn't provide the tools, techniques, and training to make it possible.

Don E. Schultz is a professor of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, president of Agora Inc. in Evanston, Ill., and senior partner of Targetbase Marketing International in Dallas.