My answer to Ben’s question is empathetically YES! My bias as I have posted before is that “the success of a business is based entirely on the relationships that business cultivates with its customers and by extension its employees.” Your customer has a relationship with your employees before they have a relationship with your organization. Your employee is the face of your organization to your customers.
The counter argument is that an employee could perform their duties in a mechanical fashion and still create customer advocates without being an advocate themselves. This argument falls apart for the same reason that Adam Smith’s argument about self interest collapses:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages”
Without safeguards unchecked benevolence denigrates into unbridled self interest at the expense of the customer. Employees will not put the interest of the customer first unless they are advocates for your organization and thus fully invested in the process.
