For all of the effort put on brand development, marketing and advertising, it still comes down spending money on employee development in the area of customer service to be successful in sales, according to a report from the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement.
The report goes so far to predict there will be a return to more direct customer contact and less reliance on mass media advertising. It states customers build relationships with the individual selling the product, not the company they are selling it for.
"Brands will always remain important. However, as technology enables greater addressability of communications and interactivity becomes mainstreamed, we may see a return to the pre-modern business world where personal relationships matter more than brand names," said Frank Mulhern, Forum academic director, who authored the report.
Therefore, companies should be investing in sales training, career development, employee recognition and rewards, ahead of investing in building their brand. This is because sales agents perform better when they are engaged.
In particular, the study, "The Employee or the Company: The Relative Importance of People versus the Company Brand on the Customer Experience," focused on salespeople in the personal insurance business.
Customer surveys found consumers gave their insurance salesperson a higher rating than the company he or she represented.
Based on the survey results, the study concluded the better the customer's experience with the individual agent, the better the agent performs in terms of account retention and new account growth. But there is no correlation, the study claims, between agent performance and the customer's view of the company.
"The customer's experience with the agent is more important than the customer's experience with the brand in driving performance," Mulhern noted. "The person is more important than the brand."
