I often pay attention to research being conducted in the customer loyalty space, in order to stay abreast of recent developments, which is how I discovered the article “The Key to Customer Loyalty“, a piece on Forbes.com reviewing results of a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers review of the customer experience across a range of industries.
I found these five statistics gleaned via the PricewaterhouseCoopers review to be very interesting:
- Almost one-third of good experiences related to service support are related to staff members’ product knowledge and recommendations. Brands should take advantage of their front-line staff to craft experiences that create psychological connections with consumers—such as affirming customers’ purchase decisions, providing friendly assistance, and preventing buyer’s remorse.
- 49% of customers don’t tell a retailer about their bad experiences (meaning that you may have no idea that customers are unhappy until they leave)
- 72% of consumers are unwilling to repurchase from retailers who fail to resolve their issues. Therefore, it is necessary to not only provide customers with feedback channels, but make sure they’re happy with your responses to their feedback (sometimes all it takes is a simple apology).
- Retailers could improve margins by 8-12% by offering free shipping—yet as many as 59% of charge for shipping. This shows that helping consumers overcome the psychological hurdles to making a purchase (such as shopping costs or rigid return policies) could pay off in attracting new customers and increasing spend with current customers.
- Only 1% of the shoppers surveyed ranked rewards programs alone as the top influencer of purchase. Because customer loyalty is strengthened by shopping experiences that forge powerful psychological connections (and not by points or rewards programs alone), the real power of a rewards program comes from augmenting rewards programs with differentiated experiences.
The bottom line is this: the key to customer loyalty is simple: a good customer service experience.
