Forum Study Proves Power of Sales Representative-Customer Relationship

NAPERVILLE, Ill., Oct. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In its latest white paper released at The Motivation Show, the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement demonstrates the power of personal contact in the relationship between sales representatives and their customers in the delivery of services. In What Drives the Quality of Customer Experiences in Service Marketing? Employees or Corporate Brands? the organization examines how the customer's business relationship with a company as a whole is influenced by personal contact with an employee versus impersonal contact with the brand.

"While the Forum study focused on the personal insurance industry -- life, health, auto and property insurers -- we believe that the experiences discovered through the research and the findings themselves could apply to many service industries including health care, financial services, education and personal services," says Beth Schelske, Forum president. "We found that the quality of the transactional experience is highly influenced by the quality of the personal interaction between the sales representative and the customer."

Jennifer Rosenzweig, Forum director of research, noted, " The results showed that customers usually rated their agents higher than they rated the company with respect to the quality of their experience, with agent-by-agent evaluation scores higher on customer satisfaction with the agent than with the company itself 90 percent of the time."

The new paper is based on the recent study, "The Employee or the Company: The Relative Importance of  People Versus the Company Brand on the Customer Experience," by Dr. Frank Mulhern, Academic Director of the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement and associate dean of research at Northwestern University's Medill School.  Dr. Mulhern's specialty is researching the role of employees in marketing strategy.

A copy of the white paper is available at: www.performanceforum.org.

The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement (www.performanceforum.org) is a research center within the Medill Integrated Marketing Communications graduate program at Northwestern University. A central objective of the Forum is to develop and disseminate knowledge about communications, motivation and management so that businesses can better design, implement and manage Employee Engagement initiatives inside and outside the organization.

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Jennifer Rosenzweig

http://www.profnetconnect.com/jenniferrosenzweig

Beth Schelske

http://www.profnetconnect.com/bethschelske

SOURCE Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement