If you need to increase the competitiveness of your business and profit, where should you start? If you focus on your employees first, or should begin to focus on their customers first? In fact, it is necessary to do both.

Almost always best to start by focusing on employees first. Highly satisfied and engaged employees are essential to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction, retention and long-term loyalty. Start by listening to their employees and take action based on constant feedback.

Conduct an employee survey / survey of employee engagement to gather information, suggestions and expertise of its employees. Ask about what is working for your company and what you can do to help make their work more effectively and do a better job of caring for customers. Include questions about the effectiveness of internal communications, business processes, teamwork and how employees feel about the direction of your company.

Make sure your employee surveys and employee engagement surveys also include questions about the effectiveness of supervisors and managers, the ability to empowerment of employees to make suggestions, the effectiveness of rewards and recognition, equality compensation, adequacy of benefits for employees, the treatment of various groups and fear in the workplace.

Include questions about quality customer service, and ways to increase productivity. Ask questions about anything that can be positive or negative impact on employees and customers.

Do not be surprised if you end up identifying a large number of challenges and opportunities. If there are challenges and problems, you need to know about them, prioritize them and take action. There is no magic wand. Identify and address the three problems is not enough, especially when there are many more problems that are affecting its employees and customers.

It is important to do a thorough job and to analyze the results of the survey. It is then equally important to create a global action plan and do a good job of everyone involved and implement the plan effectively. This requires communicating the results of surveys for employees to know that listening and is committed to making the necessary changes based on your comments.

Your goal should be to use the results of the survey of employees to achieve large increases in employee engagement and satisfaction, focusing more on their customers and meet or exceed their expectations.

To ensure that they are achieving success, conducting surveys of employee attitudes annually to measure progress and identify new challenges and opportunities arising from the previous survey employee. His focus and commitment to continuous improvement ensures customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Once you start getting positive results, you must also carry out customer surveys to assess customer satisfaction levels and see how your customers feel about your company, its employees, its products and services and other key issues drive satisfaction and retention.

Do not be afraid to ask clients about things you know are not doing well. You have to learn about how customers feel. Guessing is not good enough. Your customers are probably also buying their competitors. It is important that you learn first hand how they compare their companies, products and services with those of its competitors.

In short, take good care of your employees, set the right direction, providing good leadership, identify problems and opportunities, take action and evaluate progress in progress. This will allow your company to attract and retain customers and remain competitive and profitable.