In honor of Customer Loyalty Month, we’ll be focusing on topics that will help you increase your customer loyalty. This article is 1 of 2 in a series about how to understand your customers.
Customer loyalty is driven by a mix of variables, but there is often a divide between how your company is structured, and what the customer actually experiences when interacting with your brand and company. Usually – and unfortunately — there is a disconnect between what a company does internally and what the customer sees, and it is this mismatch that often leads to poor customer loyalty.
Frequently, when companies examine how to increase customer loyalty, they focus on the external factors, rather than the internal factors that influence the external outcomes. Companies become reactionary to customers’ satisfaction and loyalty rates, but instead of fixing the root causes – what their customers actually want – they place Band-Aids on the problem and don’t seek to understand what is really driving customer loyalty.
Why focusing on external fixes doesn’t work
What is your management team’s reaction when receiving poor customer satisfaction and loyalty scores? Do proposed “solutions” look like this?:
– “Let’s create a customer loyalty program to reward customers when they purchase more.”
– “Let’s launch a new advertising campaign that communicates how great our product is.”
– “We can slash our prices and have a sale – our prices will increase customer loyalty.”
All of these “solutions” are reactionary, and they are common courses of action that may not be fixing the root problem of why you are unable to gain customer loyalty.
Instead of focusing on reactions and changes you can make to your products, shift your paradigm of how you understand customer loyalty: Seek to understand your customers, first. Then you can create programs that fit your customers’ preferences and actually drive loyalty.
Do you know what matters to your customers?
It is easy to think myopically and assume that your customers understand the things that differentiate your company from the competition. True customer loyalty, however, happens when your customer service and product development are formed as a result of knowing who your customers are and what makes them choose your product over another.
So how do you seek to understand your customers and increase their loyalty? The first step is to talk to your customers. Survey them, or even conduct focus groups. Find out how they perceive your brand, what their perceptions are of products that are similar to yours, and, most importantly, find out what matters to them.
After you have taken the time to survey your customers and get to know what matters to them, you can then work on solutions that will satisfy their needs. Perhaps they’re not interested in another loyalty program, but what they’re really interested in is having customer service reps who they can speak to and who are truly helpful. Or, maybe their customer loyalty is driven by convenience; they want to go to a website that is easy-to-use, has quick delivery, and low shipping rates. Even if you design the most innovative program designed to drive customer loyalty, unless it is what your customers actually are looking for, it won’t work.
How to get to know your customers better through surveys
Are you ready to get to know your customers better? If so, we’ll explain how you can design surveys that will help you understand your customers better so that you can create custom programs that truly help drive customer loyalty. Stay tuned for Part Two of this series.
