Happy employees equal happy customers.

This simple equation describes the philosophy at Intuit Inc.'s QuickBooks Online Edition, which recently won the top customer service award from the Service and Support Professionals Association, a trade group for the tech support industry.

With less than 5 percent employee turnover for the year, 98 percent job satisfaction and customer satisfaction rates of 90 percent, QuickBooks Online Edition received SSPA's STAR Award for Best Practices in Managing People.

SSPA Executive Director Bill Rose said the business demonstrated real innovations in organizing and managing the support staff. "Its customer satisfaction results, combined with the reaction of customers who say it's the best support they've ever experienced, clearly demonstrate that organizational management best practices translate into a better support experience for customers,” Rose said in a statement.

The QuickBooks Online Edition team says it believes that outstanding customer service comes from staff who are motivated and experienced. The company is able to attract and keep talented employees by providing a flexible work environment. Some support staff work from home; others keep non-traditional schedules to better juggle the demands of their work and home lives.

The company says customers rave about the support they receive and gave this example. One customer said, “I'm blown away to receive an actual response from an actual person with an actual name ... Unbelievable in these days of routing and re-routing and re-re-routing (and) selecting option 1 through 300 until you get so frustrated, you quit trying ...”

QuickBooks Online Edition, which provides small business owners with accounting software over the Internet, was the fastest-growing business unit last year at Intuit, which is also known for Quicken and TurboTax software.