It’s not surprising that using a customer’s name during a transaction is good. But what may surprise you is that it’s worth 9% points of customer satisfaction. New research, see chart below shows, just how important this very small personal touch is to your customers.
See the full story: Using the Customer’s Name in the Branch
Whenever we do any Customer Loyalty Program Health Check work, the first thing that we emphasize on is that loyalty programs must generate a return. Otherwise, they are just another business cost.
Brian Cantor feels the same way: “No matter the nature of the customer rewards program, it should be designed in a way that induces additional purchasing.”
Check out his article for more insights: Why Do We Reward Our Customers?
Recently, there was much ado in Australia as the Federal Government slightly reduced (less than 10%) the amount of money that it gives to new parents: the so called Baby Bonus. The reduction in this grant has caused a lot of dissatisfaction in the community. Could your customer delight program cause a similar backlash? [Read more...]
“Capturing Customers”, “Luring Customers”, “Attracting Customers” and “Keeping Customers” are all terms used daily in marketing departments. They invoke images of carefully prepared fly patterns, practiced casts and the adrenalin of a good strike, ending with the satisfaction of a catch of the legal size, a ‘keeper’.
Many organisations view customers in the same way that the fishing industry viewed Atlantic fish stocks.
Some marketers, (not you gentle reader) allow various product managers to fish the same customer waters day in day out. They use nets, lines, perhaps even explosives,in fact any technique they can to catch all the fish they can for their product line. Large fish, small fish, dolphins and seals, no matter, the sheer weight of fish is all that matters, catch them and the folks in accounts or risk management can sort them out later.
But it can’t go on forever and interesting things happen as fish stocks deplete. [Read more...]
“If you strip away all the hype around how to ‘do’ relationships, you are left with one simple concept. The real essence of a relationship is simply a memory of past interactions.” [1]
Learning is at the heart of customer loyalty management and has been ever since the empirical work of Reichheld [2] (and others) in the early 1990’s showed that customer loyalty is directly related to corporate profits. Learning about customers and remembering them is central to the task of managing customer relationships.
Looking back all that way to the pre-Net Promoter Score primordial haze; Reichheld found 3 loyalty effects, each highly correlated with profitability,
We all know what we want from our customer loyalty programs; more, and more profitable, customers. The trouble is that customers are notoriously fickle, changeable, arbitrary, and our lifeblood.
What worked last month may not work today.
So Loyalty Programs need regular check-ups to make sure they are still achieving their objectives – in just the same way you need to regularly check and service your high performance automobile.
In fact, I sometimes think all Marketing professionals should drive old exotic sports cars, to get a feel for how much tinkering is required to keep relationship marketing initiatives on the road!
So here are five things you should check when you raise the hood of your Customer Loyalty Program: [Read more...]
Interactive marketing is a relatively new feature on the marketing and customer management landscape. It is only with the relatively recent advances in software tools that this dramatically more effective way to market to prospects and customers has come within the reach of most organisations.
And be assured that interactive marketing (also called trigger or event based marketing) can drive dramatic results: conversion rates of 45%, 35% reductions in direct marketing costs are just the tip of the iceberg.
However, to be successful there are seven critical success factors that you need to consider. [Read more...]
Recently, I came across a very useful Marketing Science article on customer lifetime value calculations. “Customer Base Analysis in a Discrete-Time Non-contractual setting,” presents an excellent and accessible way of answering the difficult question of customer lifetime value when no ongoing contractual relationship exists.
The paper itself was enlightening. Unfortunately, as is often the case with academic papers, the key business insights are hidden from plain sight behind a rather dense, high order, statistics heavy paper. I am sure their findings are as clear as glass to the authors. However, for me, I needed some time to unpack the content, understand it, and work out how to apply it for my customers. [Read more...]
A lot of companies struggle with determining just how to build their organization structure around customer loyalty management. Is there a separate customer loyalty group, or is it integrated into the rest of the organisation? And how does it work in practice?
However, there is hope and some clear best practice approaches out there that you can use in your own organisation. [Read more...]
One of the reasons that I like the Transactional Net Promoter Score® approach is that it allows for proactive service recovery.
Transactional NPS® focuses on each service moment of truth and asks the customer about their experience at that exact time. This allows you to drill down into each customer touch point and quantify its ability to generate or destroy customer loyalty. As a bonus, if you run the process in the right way, you can generate a service recovery notification for sub-standard customer experiences. [Read more...]
