Loyal employees
To be able to create excited customers and contribute to memorable experiences you need to be excited as an employee as well. You have to meet the customer at an emotional level.
This implies that the employees must be happy with their jobs to have what it takes to meet the customer in this way. If you are unhappy doing your job it can be quite hard to convince the customers about how outstanding the company is. In this case a loyal employee both means an employee who has been in the company for a long time – gaining a great deal of knowledge about customers, processes and the service culture of the company – and an employee who cares for the company, is aware of the costs and gives the customer extra service etc.
This is the kind of loyalty that affects the bottom line (do you for instance turn off the lights before you go home Friday afternoon, or do you just leave it on until Monday and think: “Who cares?”). The opposite of employee loyalty is an employee that answers the guest: “Don’t ask me, I just work here…”
In the same way that customer loyalty is driven by WOW experiences rather than just satisfaction, the same applies to employees. In order to be a loyal employee you have to be a satisfied employee as a minimum.