IT ALL STARTED when one of our customers called me and said: “Steve can you please attend a meeting, we are having a real big issue with our customer satisfaction and employee productivity and we would like you to share a few words with our employees.”

Just to give you a little background about our company, we have been in the Recognition and Awards business since 1960 and have worked with all sorts of companies both big and small. So as you can see we are no strangers to this industry. Our customer told me that 40% of their customers were unhappy and employee satisfaction was down! At that time this company had 4000 employees. I readily agreed to help in whatever way I could.

I soon found myself on one of the many buses the company hired to take the employees to a huge event sponsored by the company. For some reason I decided to wear my “Happy Hat” - a black baseball cap with a little smiley face embroidered on it. I don’t know why I put that one on, but later it really came in handy. To tell you the truth, I was very nervous because this was the first time that I would have spoken to a large group of people. The good news for me was that there would be other people speaking who, like
me, were not professional speakers, but rather they were from the "rank and file" of the company to discuss what was going on at the ground level. The people who attended and spoke were people with whom the company comes in contact with everyday such as customers, employees and vendors. I was a vendor. The idea was to show that everyone is important, not just the customers.

I remember feeling a bit sick, looking at the crowd, thinking to myself, “What words of wisdom could I offer these people? Was I even in a position to give words of wisdom?” I remember the CEO getting up and saying” Everyone and every job is important” He gave a big speech on how treating each other
with respect and taking requests from other departments and vendors is a serious matter, and it goes without saying how important it is to take good care of the customer. Everyone no matter how far removed they are from the customer has a direct affect on the customers’ satisfaction. This CEO had the wisdom to know that making all the people that worked with this company feel important and appreciated was going to be what his company needed to turn things around. My turn to speak was approaching quickly. The butterflies in my stomach turned into a stampede of elephants; have you ever had an elephant in your stomach? (Speaking of elephants this same company had us customize a t-shirt for an elephant as part of an in house incentive program, but that’s another story!)

I heard the MC introduce me and then handed me the mic. I first looked at the mic then looked at the people. The silence was deafening, all eyes were looking at me. Waiting for my "words of wisdom” I began to speak; it was the first time I heard my voice over a microphone and my facial expression reflected that fact. After the laughter, I told them that the bottom line is that it was all about "this" and then I pointed to my “Happy Hat” with a smiley face on it and said “Make it contagious”. They all laughed again, clapped and shook their heads in confirmation.

Apparently I was a success since afterwards I was called into the corporate office to discuss some ideas about an employee recognition program. Since our customer's problem was actually twofold - low employee productivity and low customer satisfaction - we worked with our customer to develop an employee recognition program from the standpoint that there is a direct connection between recognition and increased employee productivity and satisfaction which then results in increased customer satisfaction. This program became so successful that after 3 years of using it not only did employee productivity substantially increase but so did their customer satisfaction rate. The customer satisfaction rate went from 60% to 95% with some divisions reporting 100%. The result of all of this was the creation of our unique PraiseStar™ Portal for Praise software and system.

Story by Steve Howard, CEO & President, A Thank You Store® Creator of PraiseStar™ Your Portal for Praise / PraiseStar.com