Just as the human touch makes face-to-face meetings more meaningful than virtual ones, personalized customer service is proving to be more important to the bottom line than brand image alone.

A new study published by the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement shows that companies which invest in people-development activities to drive customer service, including sales training and employee recognition and rewards, may perform better than firms focusing solely on brand development, marketing, and advertising.

The study, “The Employee or the Company: The Relative Importance of People Versus the Company Brand on the Customer Experience,” written by the Forum’s academic director Frank Mulhern of Northwestern University, predicts a return to more direct customer contact and less reliance on mass media advertising.

“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 Mulhern.

Industries where these relationships are more common include personal service businesses such as health care, financial services, and education, as opposed to mass retailing. The Forum’s study focused on the nation’s personal insurance industry (life, health, auto, and property), which showed dramatic links between sales agent performance and customer retention and new business.

Findings showed that customers rate their agents higher than they rate the company, and agents with tenure had higher customer retention rates than newer agents. Also companies with both agent engagement and customer ratings of agent experienced 4 percent account growth compared to about 2 percent growth when there was just one element present, not both. Surprisingly, there was little correlation between having highly engaged agents and customer service marks.

For more information or a copy of the Forum’s report, visit www.performanceforum.org. This page is protected by Copyright laws. Do Not Copy