Dean J. Polsin of United States Cellular Corp. wrote: "I believe there are many variables associated with happy customers. If you have happy employees that are not focusing on the requirements or expectations that will satisfy or delight a customer, your customers won't be happy. However, if your processes are aligned with the factors that satisfy the customer, you can have happy customers. This assumes that your unhappy employees don't sabotage the process. If your employees are happy and your processes are aligned with your customers, you will have happy, and possibly delighted, customers."

J. Howland of Philips Broadband Networks wrote: "Your column doesn't sit well with me. The data that you used for you research doesn't compare apples with apples. There are a lot of criteria points and political hoopla that go into those different lists, and comparing one with the other seems a bit unfair."

Stephen J. Cutler and Craig Carpenter of Polk Audio Inc. wrote: "We don't find any fault with trying to make employees happy, with the thought that happy employees make happy, satisfied customers. Perhaps you're confusing customer satisfaction with company performance or obtaining results. Hitting goals and customer satisfaction may not necessarily go hand-in-hand. The economy and/or outside, uncontrollable factors have a lot to do with a company not performing. Employees can be happy and customer satisfaction high, and results poor. We strongly believe that a happy employee is a more productive one. But making and keeping employees happy will not necessarily make your business successful."

Quality Digest columnist Thomas Pyzdek wrote: "Perhaps at the extremely high level at which you studied the problem, there is no correlation. However, a good deal of research shows that the happier the customer contact worker, the higher the level of customer satisfaction."

Joe F. Griffin, who teaches continuous quality improvement classes, wrote: "I've studied Southwest Airlines for the last five years, and my conclusion is that any attempt to correlate customer satisfaction to employee satisfaction in isolation of other factors is a mistake. At Southwest Airlines, there appears to be a positive correlation between employee and customer satisfaction, but this is due to more important underlying factors."

Bill Dignin of Garratt-Callahan Co. wrote: "Perhaps many of the 'best organizations to work for' are in businesses more vulnerable to customer dissatisfaction. This and other factors simply override any possible correlation between happy employees and happy customers."

After reading all of your input, I'm beginning to believe (no hard data supports this) that there is a direct correlation between dissatisfied employees and dissatisfied customers. It matches very well up to the point that the employees are satisfied; at that point, other factors begin to have a greater influence on customer satisfaction. Employees are happy when they're doing challenging and interesting work. But such activities may not be directed at satisfied customers.

For example, recently I went to a local computer store. The clerk was talking with a customer who was obviously another "techie." They talked about a new printer announced in PC Magazine that would be available in six months. They discussed who would lecture at their next club meeting. They talked about three different Internet sites that had just come up. Eventually, the customer gave the clerk his Web address and, at last, the clerk rang up $18.37, handed the customer a bag and turned to me, stating, "Sorry to keep you waiting." He seemed to be a very happy employee with a big smile on his face. The store had one very satisfied customer and one very dissatisfied customer.

The same holds true for customers. When I was in development engineering at IBM, the things that I wanted to work on and the things that the customer wanted from IBM were very different. I wanted to work on something I could patent. IBM wanted me to work on things they could sell. Great designs don't necessarily require the engineers that create them to be extremely satisfied with the organization. It just requires them not to be unhappy with the organization.