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1.
Build staff loyalty
It's
a fact: firms with high levels of customer loyalty have also earned high levels
of staff loyalty. It's darn near impossible to build strong customer loyalty
with a staff that is in constant turnover. Why?
Because customers buy relationships and familiarity. They want to buy from
people who know them and their preferences. Key rule of loyalty: serve your
employees first so that they, in turn, can serve your customer. 2.
Practice the 80/20 rule In
building customer loyalty, the 80/20 rule is alive and well. Roughly speaking,
80% of your revenue is being generated by 20% of your customers. All
customers are not created equal. Some represent more long-term value to your
firm than others. A smart company segments customers by value and monitors
activities closely to ensure high-value customers get their fair share of
special offers and promotions. Unlike many firms that simply measure overall
redemption, these savvy loyalty builders pay close attention to who redeems.
3.
Know your loyalty stages and ensure that your customers are moving through them Customers
become loyal to a company and its products and service one step at a time. By
understanding the customer's current loyalty stage, you can better determine
what's necessary to move that customer to the next level of loyalty. There are
six stages of customer loyalty: suspect, prospect, first-time customer, repeat
customer, client and advocate. If
your customer relationship processes and programs aren't moving customers
forward, rethink them. 4.
Serve first, sell second Today's
customers are smarter, better informed and more intolerant of "being
sold" than ever before. They expect doing business with you to be as
hassle-free and gratifying for them as possible. When
they experience good service elsewhere, they bring a
if-they-can-do-it-why-can't-you attitude to their next transaction with you.
They believe that you earn their business with service that is pleasant,
productive and personalized; and if you don't deliver, they'll leave. 5.
Aggressively seek out customer complaints For
most companies, only 10% of complaints get articulated by customers. The other
90% are unarticulated and manifest themselves in many negative ways: unpaid
invoices, lack of courtesy to your frontline service reps and, above all,
negative word of mouth. With the Internet, an unhappy customer can now reach thousands of your would-be customers in a few keystrokes. Head off bad press before it happens. Make it easy for customers to complain, and treat complaints seriously. Establish firm guidelines regarding customer response time, reporting and trend analysis. Make employee complaint monitoring a key tool for executive decision making. 6.
Stay responsive Research
shows that responsiveness is closely tied to a customer's perception of good
service. The advent of the Internet has changed the customer's perception of
responsiveness. More and more, customers are coming to expect round-the-clock
customer service. Moreover,
customers now arrive at Web sites time-starved and eager to locate answers.
Technology tools such as customer self-service, email management and live
chat/Web callback are proving increasingly critical for companies as they
address the demanding customer's responsiveness needs. 7.
Know your customer's definition of value The
loyalty password is "value." Knowing how your customers experience
value and then delivering on those terms is critical to building strong customer
loyalty. But
knowing your customer's true definition of value is not easy, because your
customers' value definitions are constantly changing. Invest in customer loyalty
research that enables you to understand, through the eyes of the customer, how
well you deliver value. 8.
Win back lost customers Research
shows that a business is twice as likely to successfully sell to a lost customer
as to a new prospect. Yet, winning back lost customers is frequently the most
overlooked source for incremental revenue in many firms. Why?
Because most firms consider a lost customer a lost cause. With the average
company losing 20-40% of its customers every year, it's imperative that firms
create hard-working strategies not only for acquisition and retention but also
for win-back. Since no customer retention program can be 100% foolproof, it
follows that every company needs a process for recapturing those high-value
customers who depart. Think of it as loyalty insurance. 9.
Use multiple channels to serve the same customers well Research
suggests that customers who engage with a firm through multiple channels exhibit
deeper loyalty than single-channel customers. But take note: this finding
assumes that customers get the same consistent service whether coming into the
store, logging on the Web site or calling the service centre. To
achieve consistency, your firm must internally coordinate sales and service
across multiple channels so that customer preferences are accessible no matter
how the customer chooses to interact. Today's customers expect to hop from
channel to channel, and they expect good service to follow. 10.
Give your frontline the skills to perform Increasingly,
for many companies, the employee "frontline" is a call centre where
agents interact with customers. These agents will be the "loyalty
warriors" of the future. Converged call centres that bring together
multi-channel access points (phone, fax, email, Web) are on the rise. Gartner
Group estimates that 70% of North America's call centres will migrate to
multi-channel contact centres by 2005. This means that those agents need to be
as equipped to write a well-written email reply and navigate the company Web
site as they are in being helpful and friendly on a phone call. 11.
Collaborate with your channel partners In
today's complex marketplace, a firm is often dependent on many suppliers to help
serve its customers. Embracing these supply chain relationships for the greater
good of the ultimate customer creates customer value that is hard for
competitors to match. For
example, a European auto manufacturer converted its customer data base program
into a system that could be shared by all channel partners. By refusing to hoard
the information, the manufacturer helped create a blended channel strategy that
built greater customer loyalty throughout the distribution chain. 12.
Store your data in a centralized database Most
firms lack a 360-degree view of their customer because they have no centralized
database. Billing departments, sales divisions and customer service centres
might all have their own databases, with no effective means for creating a
complete customer-information composite. To
effectively implement a sound customer loyalty strategy, data from all customer
touchpoints must be combined into a centralized customer database. Without it,
the firm is greatly handicapped in its efforts to serve the customer. by Jill Griffin
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