blog of engagement

Customers are a finicky bunch.  It only takes one bad experience to destroy loyalty to a brand. Businesses everywhere are looking to earn and keep the loyalty of customers, and in most cases they are falling short because they don’t deliver a great experience. Businesses must:

• Create Lifetime Loyalty: Businesses have to keep a customer’s loyalty by delivering the brand promise to every customer, in every location, every single time.
• Recover Lost Loyalty: As a result of today’s social media proliferation, an unhappy customer tells hundreds of thousands in an instant as the most compelling stories go viral.  Prompt response and open dialog regarding a broken brand promise are keys to recovering loyalty and minimizing potential brand damage in the marketplace.

What Goes Wrong?
I have noticed two situations that most often cause customer loyalty to erode:

• When a culture doesn’t match the brand promise.
• When all areas of the business aren’t working together as a system.

Three Steps to Drive Customer Loyalty in your Organization:

1. Be clear on your brand promise, communicate it first to your employees at all levels of the organization, and then to customers.

2. Diagnose the customer service problem in your organization, considering both the culture and the entire system of the company.

3. Then, plan interventions.  Is the problem with your culture or your system?

A customer for life is the ultimate testament to the success of your organization.  Are you creating customers for life… or customers for now?  Let me hear from you.  What customer loyalty challenges are happening in your business?  How are you handling them?