It sounds relatively simple. Make your employees happy and they’ll make your customers happy. Those satisfied customers will come back and spend more money, making managers and stockholders happy in turn.

Unfortunately, customer service scores indicate many organizations aren’t getting the message. According to a Consumer Reports survey released earlier this month, 64 percent of surveyed customers have walked out of a store because of poor service and 67 percent have hung up the phone before their problem was addressed.

Employees aren’t feeling the love either. In a June 2010 survey of private sector employees in the U.S. conducted by HCL Technologies, an IT services company, nearly half said employees were the least valued group at the company, ranking behind customers and top management, even though those same front-line employees bear primary responsibility for customer service.

A new study should give talent managers the ammunition to convince bosses that workplace programs to boost employee satisfaction will also impact the bottom line.

Writing in The Journal of Service Research, researchers lay out results of their study of the service-profit chain that links employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction, intent to repurchase to actual purchase. Findings indicate that companies that pay attention to employee satisfaction are able to boost customer satisfaction as well as intent to purchase products again.

“This is not a one-way street where companies implement policies and can expect to experience gains solely through customer services,” said Christopher Groening, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Missouri and one of the authors of the paper. “The relationships among the CEO, the employees and the customers are all linked. It’s important for CEOs to know that they can have a large impact on customer service without ever talking with a customer or implementing a new customer service policy.”