How to Keep an Ex-Employee From Stealing Customers
If you have worked for years to build your business and the lists of people that your company does business with, it can be a problem when an employee leaves the company and tries to use your business information to start his own business using your customers. You need to take the most basic steps to protect your interests and be certain that your customers remain with your business as long as possible.
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Instructions
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Recognize that you do not own your customers and that they are free to do business with any company that they choose. Work to keep your customers satisfied and provide quality services and products at a fair price to minimize the desire of customers to defect to any other company, including that of an ex-employee who is forming his own company. Keeping employees satisfied will help with this as well.
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Draft an employee nonsoliciation agreement and have all of your employees sign this form. A noncompete agreement states that you will not work in a similar business within the same geographic area. These agreements are commonly struck down by court decisions. A nonsoliciation agreement is more likely to be accepted by a court as legal and enforceable. This agreement says that the employee is not permitted to contact customers of the company within a certain number of months if the employee leaves the company.
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Ensure that no one employee has "sole and exclusive" contact with a customer. This type of contact is when an employee is the only one in the company that has contact with that customer. By having multiple employees interact with a customer, his link to your company could become deeper, and make it more difficult for an ex-employee to make him a defecting customer legally.
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Use any trade secret protection laws that your state has available. Customer lists are often considered trade secrets, and an employee who prints a list of company customers or downloads customer name and address databases onto his own computer has probably violated trade secrets laws. Even if the employee is not covered by a nonsolicitaion agreement, he will probably be prohibited from this activity by the courts.
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Tips & Warnings
Keep your employees happy and well taken care of, so that they will be less likely to leave the company and steal customers as they are leaving.
If you have nonsolicitation agreements in place or if your state has a trade secret law, pursue quick action against any ex-employee who uses confidential information to take your business's customers.
