Staffing and Customer Retention: A Homerun for Your Business

At this time of year, I look forward to two events: 1) The opening of the major league baseball season; and, 2) The results from the first quarter of our Vistage CEO Confidence Index and March WSJ/Vistage Small Business CEO Survey.  I always like to see my Boston Red Sox get off to a quick start, and I’m always interested in looking at the first quarter results from our surveys, as they provide a clear window into what we can anticipate for the rest of the year.  Optimism among CEOs regarding the overall economy and individual business performance remains strong which is good news for the remainder of the year.

Looking inside the numbers, offers us a reminder of the relationship between hiring great people and delivering excellent customer service. Leveraging this relationship will be essential for fueling continued confidence.  As part of our quarterly CEO Confidence Index, CEOs identify staffing and customer retention as the most significant issues they face right now.  In our WSJ/Vistage Small Business CEO survey, more than 90 percent of the CEOs surveyed said it is difficult to find candidates that possess all of the job skills they are looking for when hiring.

The takeaway here is clear:  If you really care about customer retention, you have to focus on recruiting and retaining the best people to help you serve and maintain those customer relationships. In this month’s Pulse of Small Business, our Chief Human Resources Officer Michael Molina joins me to talk about ways you can hire and keep your very best employees.  I invite you to contribute your ideas to the conversation as well.  What innovative approaches to staffing are you taking on behalf of your customers?  I look forward to your comments.

In the meantime, the first few games of the season tell us nothing about what’s ahead for the Red Sox or any other team for that matter. Only time will tell whether the Sox hired the right people to fill the seats and get them back to the World Series.

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