Employee turnover directly damages customer relationships in B2B service and manufacturing firms. Measure internal retention first before looking at customer numbers, because customers may stay despite broken relationships with staff, giving you false signals about business health.
If you can retain your people, what I found was that a higher correlation of you being able to retain your customers, especially true for B2B service businesses, but even in manufacturing where you've got long-term relationships with distributors, OEMs, you've got to be able to hold onto your people. So I often say, if somebody says, where do I start, right, on retention? I start with how is your, to your point, how is your internal retention, right? What are the numbers? How do you do that? What, how do you approach your, people retention strategy. And then I look at the external numbers because sometimes if you start externally just on the customers, you may get some false positives. Customers may be sticking around and they may also be shopping because the relationships they have with your people are broken. And so I start in the, in the middle and then work out.
Reducing Regrettable Attrition in Organizations by Fixing the System, Not the People Reducing Regret
