By Bob McCann, Lead Certification Consultant, MRAA
Customer satisfaction in our industry is defined as a measure of how a boat builder’s product and a dealer’s service perform compared to customer’s expectations. It has long been the method to measure the effectiveness of the Marine Industry Certified Dealership Program (MICD). I propose that employee satisfaction is the most important factor leading to customer satisfaction and how MICD helps dealers start with improving the employee experience.
Employees are the driving factor behind customer satisfaction. Employee interactions at the dealership set the tone for a positive or negative customer experience. When the team isn’t happy, their interactions with customers can, and almost always will, reflect that, and, in turn, suffer. Over the course of time, this can have serious repercussions for a dealership.
The place where this becomes the most critical at most dealerships is when employees are directly interacting with customers, such as the front-end service folks. Historically overworked and under resourced, employees in these jobs are tasked with spending their entire day interacting with customers. They’re the ones getting yelled at when they have to inform a customer that their boat won’t be ready for the weekend. It can be a thankless job, and it’s only made worse when the employees are treated [and feel] like pawns in a chess game.
This is where Dealership Certification can help. Dealers must put the same effort into taking care of their employees as they do in taking care of their customers. If even a fraction of your customer experience effort or budget was spent on employee satisfaction, there would be a huge return on investment.
One of the easiest ways to enhance employee satisfaction is to ask for and welcome their feedback. Your staff has great awareness into your customers’ needs. After all, they’re the ones who are directly interacting with customers and hearing their criticisms and compliments firsthand. Employees can be your biggest asset when it comes to customer satisfaction, so it’s vital to let them share their insights. We’ve learned that the Employee Satisfaction Survey (ESS) process is by far the dealer’s favorite part of MICD. This part of the program not only aids you in gaining feedback from your employees, but also helps you implement the necessary changes to make your dealership a better place to work.
A large part of employee satisfaction revolves around understanding what employees need and want, and gaining awareness into what will work well and what won’t. By learning about employee’s desires, owners and managers can make necessary changes to the dealership. Not everything needs to revolve around your employees’ demands, but there are many places where change can be enacted at a minimal cost and effort.
It is also a good time to shift your mindset, moving from thinking employees just work for you, to acknowledging that they’re valuable contributors to a dealership’s success. Employees need to understand how important their role is and how their work fits into the bigger picture. They need to feel like their voices are being heard and that they have respect from the owners and managers. Most importantly, they should arrive at the dealership each day knowing that their work is appreciated by both the customers and the dealer.
There’s a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Happy employees equal happy customers, and unhappy employees lead to unhappy customers. That’s the simple way of looking at it, but the Marine Industry Certification program, with its tools and processes, helps dealers improve their employee experience in order to elevate the customer experience.
