It’s a trick question. The right answer has nothing to do with how awesome your customers are. It has everything to do with how much you do to help them be awesome. Oh, and I don’t mean just awesome either. Here, “awesome” is a proxy for successful, happy, please, excited, thrilled or whatever experience outcome they are looking for. You can use whatever adjective you want. I use the word “awesome” because it fits with a graphic that tells a smart story about how to keep customers coming back. It’s by Tom Fishburne who calls himself a “marketoonist”. Tom’s a bright guy who [...]
Customer Service Loyalty & Retention
Customer loyalty and retention are critical for an organization to thrive. They are signs your company is doing the right things in the right way for the right price. A major part of what drives customer loyalty and retention is how we serve our customers. This section of our website looks at examples of how to increase customer loyalty, how to value it and things you can do to increase it.
Tonight we had a delicious dinner at Famous Dave’s in Burnsville. I’ll be honest, what brought us there was the offer of a free dinner. (It was in honor of Debbie’s birthday.) What surprised us was the amazing customer service we experienced. As we walked in we were greeted by Jacob. He made instant eye contact with us and delivered a big smile as he welcomed us into Famous Dave’s. The rest of the evening was a pleasant mix of BBQ pulled pork, mashed potatoes and fun conversation with Jacob. We learned a little of the history of Famous Dave’s. [...]
For the past 6 years (maybe more) a group of us have gotten together every Saturday morning for breakfast. In this time we have eaten at just about every breakfast place in our area. We often tried different restaurants for variety but also for service. Eventually we settled on one place (Perkins) and we have made that our permanent Saturday breakfast headquarters for the last several years. Until last week. Last week several of us thought it would be fun to try a new place for our weekly breakfast club. Actually, it was literally a new restaurant, having just opened. Some of [...]
Much has been said about the value and importance of customer loyalty. Intuitively we know it’s (usually) better to keep our customers coming back than to see them go to our competition. It’s one thing to understand this as a general business principle. It’s another thing entirely to see how customer loyalty can impact your bottom line. Sometimes seeing the difference in dollars and cents can have a bigger impact on what we do to keep our customers coming back. This makes it harder to ignore the value of customer retention. To help with this, I have created a tool that tells [...]
Over 9 million times every month, someone does a Google search on the word “trust”. Google Trends shows a steady upward trend in the word “trust” used in media stories since 2004. We hear the word every day. Many of of use the term daily. Some more than others. “Trust me, I wouldn’t even offer you this car if it wasn’t in perfect condition. You won’t be sorry!” But do we really know what the word “Trust” means? More importantly, do we truly understand its value? Trust can help us do our jobs better. And, when baked into an organization’s [...]
In the world of customer loyalty we usually look at how can the company (and their employees) do the right things to increase customer loyalty. And this makes sense. It’s the actions of an organization that create the customer experience and either attract people or drive them away. But having valuable, long-term relationships with customers is not just about how the company or its employees behave. The success of a customer relationship is as dependent on the customer as it is on the people providing the product or service. When customers behave badly or demand too much, they set the [...]
It seems natural customer loyalty would follow good service. If you get what you want and you are treated right, why would you not return to a business? But sometimes it’s useful to have more than an intuitive argument. So I have done a bit of research and I have found two statistics that tell me there is a clear link connecting customer service and customer loyalty. They also suggest some substantial benefits from improving customer service. The first is a well-known number. It comes to us from the American Society of Quality Control (as best I can determine). According [...]
Just about every company wants more loyal customers. Many think the way to increase loyalty is with bribes. Not real bribes of course – bribes are bonus points, frequent flier miles, and any other program that pays customers to continue doing business with a company. These programs seem to work because people use them. But there’s a big difference between someone who stays with a company because they want to and someone who stays because they get paid to. Think of it this way (to paraphrase Jeff Gitomer): Would you want your best friend to be your friend because they want [...]
Many companies are focused on their customers. They LOVE their customers. Just ask them. They’ll tell you how wonderfully customer centric they are. But there’s a problem. As they tell people how much they love their customers, they also spend a lot of money lying to them. Jim Logan writes an article at B2BRainmaker.com that illustrates this well. In it he talks about offer’s he’s gotten from various companies and how they sound or look good on the surface. But closer inspection shows they are misleading at best and outright lies at worst. A well-known example Jim cites is
I talk and write a lot about giving our customers what they want. Because if we fail to give them what they want they’ll leave us. That’s what customer loyalty is all about. But as we do this, we should keep in mind some guidelines. The following video helps us see (in a funny way) what some companies do wrong as they try to keep their customers coming back. First, they forget to
