These days, the advice is to "neuter competition" or satisfy customers completely. Limit customers' choice. Regulations, airport landing rights, broadcast licenses, mergers do this. You can make it inconvenient or expensive for customers to switch. Frequent-flier plans are so powerful that few airlines try to make flying pleasant.
What are best practices to build loyalty? Ease and ubiquity are two...
location or ease of Access? McDonald's Ubiquity? Windows95?
Most important, though: Marry! customers--to forge intimate, mutually beneficial partnerships based on an exchange of knowledge about each other's desires, needs, abilities, and character.
1. Customer loyalty comes from many things. Yes, it's beyond the-call-of-duty performance when something goes wrong. But Lexus keeps its owners through service-they make ordinary events seem wonderful.
2. Create a "branded customer experience." According to Mintel International. customer service, responsiveness to complaints, and the behavior of staff rank right after quality and price. Express or reiterate the promise of your brand in the product and at every point of contact between you and your customer. Do not let customer encounters contradict your brand's promise. Southwest Airlines delights its customers by making and keeping a promise to be cheap and fast, and the airline reminds passengers continually with employees in shorts, tacky plastic boarding cards, cattle-herding boarding, and packaged peanuts.
3. Analyze the branded customer experience. Ask: What's our brand of customer delight-- what are we known for, what do customers expect us to deliver reliably, where's our wow?"
Canadian Pacific Hotels frequent-guest club members have been mapped at every bit of their "guest experience." Each event called for a high level of service, based on what customer expectation. Each of my (JL's) personal experiences at CP hotels bears out that this program works. CP prepares special pillows, a copy of a favorite newspaper or magazine, custom drinks in the minibar, favorite movies ... whatever it takes. A 'champion' is appointed at each hotel with cross-functional authority to enforce the high promises CP had made
Three Steps to Branding Customer Experience. Ask:
- 1. What products or services can we offer?
- 2. What processes do we need to put in place to offer them?
- 3. What do employees have to do or learn to deliver them?
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