Category Archives: Customer Satisfaction

Does customer focus matter in banking?

Posted on October 9, 2012 by | 1 comment
Customer Service in Banking Does it Pay?

Customer Focus in Banking Does it Pay?

A recent article in the New York Times highlighted one bank analyst’s view that “Spending time solving problems with people is not selling products…. Its wasting time”.

As a bank analyst his role is to review the bank’s financials and make buy, sell or hold recommendations to his clients. His statements came after having a poor customer experience at his local Wells Fargo. He lamented, “I’m struck by the fact that the service is so bad, and yet the company is so good.”

This particular analyst has a history of being controversial so what he says has to be taken with a grain a salt, however, does he have a point?

The analyst decided to change banks as a result of the poor experience. Did he expect other customers not to respond in the same way? By letting their feet do the talking?

This incident raises challenges relevant to all leaders trying to improve customer focus.

Would you use a single example of failure to conclude this is the way Wells Fargo does business? Common sense suggests the answer would be “no”.

Was this experience and an anomaly or symptom of greater problems? Was it a one off issue confined to one employee in a single branch or a sign of a broader cultural issue?

In Wells Fargo’s case the evidence suggests the former. Over the past few years the bank has a string of top place finishes in customer satisfaction independently measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Based on our research we know that companies with high levels of satisfaction are more profitable. The reason Wells Fargo is doing well is because of its customer focus not in spite of it as the analyst suggests.

Another question highlighted by this story is how important is “customer service” to the banking experience?

Customer service is part of a customer’s consideration set but it will vary in importance depending on the customer. Customers have different needs and will use the bank’s services in different ways. A customer looking for a mortgage will be more sensitive to the bank mortgage rate than one that only has a checking account. Some customers may never enter a bank branch. They conduct all their banking online. Customer service from them only becomes an issue when something goes wrong.

As a business leader what is more important to understand is how customer centric is the company’s culture. Am I setting sending the right messages to our team about the importance of customers? Am I role modeling the behavior that I know will make us successful in the customer’s eyes?

What do you think?

Is this a bank analyst just trying to be controversial to get publicity? Is it a one off or an early warning sign?

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Culture and Profit Link, customer focus, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer Value

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4 simple practices to build a customer culture in your company

Posted on October 4, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This is a great short video interview with Tony Hsieh of Zappos discussing how the concept of culture and customers come together. Also thanks to Robert Reiss, host of The CEO TV Show.

The intersection of customers and corporate culture

The culture of an organization dictates how it will view customers and how it will treat them.

If everyone is expected to understand who customers are and what they value, then people naturally start doing this. Culture is a form of social pressure, it is the way you are expected to behave in a group environment, hence it is a very powerful way for leaders to create an environment of success.

Customer culture specifically looks at how much attention is being placed on bring the customer viewpoint into all decision making. It is a proven way to drive better business results as it ensures the business is aligned with its market.

Here are some great customer culture building practices that you can begin today regardless of the role you play in your company:

1. Put Customers on the Agenda

A great habit that gets everyone thinking is to start every meeting with a customer insight. Share one piece of feedback you’ve collected, one idea you have heard directly from a customer. These insights and stories can come from anywhere in the company. It does not have to be a deep conversation – just a way to get in the habit of brining the customer viewpoint inside before getting on with the rest of the meeting’s agenda.

2. Building Customer Empathy

Have someone share their own recent customer experience. Was it a positive one? What made it positive? Why did it stand out in their mind? How does it affect the way they think about that company and would it influence whether that would continue doing business with them? What does it mean for your company?

This simple exercise is a great way to build customer empathy in the team. By thinking like a customer you can make changes that will drive increases in value.

Steve Jobs and his leadership team conducted a similar exercise and recognized how dissatisfied they all were with their mobile phones. In their experience, phone’s were difficult to navigate, complex and basically not user friendly. This created the drive and inspiration to develop the iPhone.

3. Encourage Leaders to Share Customer Stories

Create a regular opportunity for senior executives to report on what they learn from their own conversations and interactions with customers.

There maybe extra leg work to translate what they heard into a useable insight, but it will be well worth the effort.

4. A Top Successes/Frustrations Customer Conversations Report

Create an ongoing forum for people to share what customers are saying in the form of a communication piece to the whole company. It should be in story form but can include statistics on key customer metrics ie things that are important to customers that your company helps them achieve. For example LinkedIn tracks how many new connections it helped people create on its professional networking site each day.

It should also include the top frustrations customers have when doing business with you. This highlights to everyone the priorities in terms of maintaining and improving customer satisfaction levels.

We have lots of FREE tools, templates and elearning modules to help build your customer culture here

What other practices do you use to drive a great level of focus on customers?

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Posted in Branding, C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Competitor Insight, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Insight, Customer Metrics, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity, leadership, Market Culture in Action

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How Hawaiian Airlines has built a Customer Culture

Posted on October 3, 2012 by | 3 comments
Hawaiian Airlines Customer Focused Culture

Hawaiian Airlines – Customer Focused Culture

Charles Nardello, the SVP of Operations at Hawaiian Airlines, recently wrote about how they were able to drive improvement in the key metrics important to airline customers.

Hawaiian are now routinely ranked first by the US Department of Transportation among all airlines for on-time performance and fewest cancellations as well as garnering top marks for best baggage handling and fewest customer complaints.

How did Hawaiian achieve these outcomes? By creating a customer culture based on 3 strategies:

1) Really understanding the Hawaiian travel customer

2) Benchmarking Hawaiian on customer “moments of truth” regularly

3) Empowering Hawaiian employees to handle unexpected situations

Knowing your Customer

Hawaiian Airlines is infused with a customer focused culture that permeates everything.

“For every decision we make, from the most basic to the complex, the customer always comes first—they are the driver of our decision-making and strategic planning,” – Charles Nardello

A culture that brings the customer perspective to every decision acts very differently than a company where customers are an afterthought or are only considered when reacting to customer problems. At every level of the organization, whether deciding on which cutlery to use in the cabin or which markets to fly to, a deep understanding of the customers they serve and the experience they want to create drives the decision.

Benchmarking and Embracing Complaints

In order to benchmark, Hawaiian Airlines surveys customers every month on their experiences with the airline and factors the results into every employee’s bonus pay.

“Every employee receives a scorecard rating them on how well they’ve performed in interacting directly with the customer or, in the case of senior executives, on decision-making and strategic planning.” – Charles Nardello

It’s an approach that guarantees that everyone at the airline will remain focused on the customer. In particular they are focused on the key moments of truth that drive the most value for their customers. This includes check-in, boarding, the flight itself, baggage retrieval and how customers are treated via each stage of their journey.

The airline reinforces this customer focus via a streaming news ticker that runs on the lower part of computer screens and TVs  in break rooms and crew lounges. The ticker show unedited, unfiltered, real-time customer reaction via social media.

Nardello suggests that he is grateful for complaints as it provides the opportunity to do something immediately to improve.

Unfortunately most customer’s don’t complain they just leave and the company wonders what happened. In fact customers are more likely to complain to someone else about the experience than the company directly. This creates even more of challenge for a company to win them back.

If a reaction is negative, the airline addresses it immediately. As Nardello points out, “Our speed in addressing the problem could make the difference between retaining that customer for future flights or losing him or her forever.”

Empowered Employees

No company can prepare for every situation  that can trigger customer dissatisfaction, which is why those that excel at customer service train and empower their frontline employees to solve problems on the fly.

“We believe employees perform best when empowered to improvise and bring unmatched service to their customers in a sincere, personal way.”

This strategy has served Hawaiian well as it continues to be ranked among the very best airlines in North America. It was recently ranked 3rd most profitable on a pre-tax margin basis behind two other airlines know for high levels of customer focus – Alaskan Air and Southwest Airlines.

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Case Study, Culture Change and Social Media, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Culture and Profit Link, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Insight, Customer Metrics, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service

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Why most companies don’t deliver great customer experiences

Posted on September 27, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Poor Customer ExperiencesWe are all customers and we know what a great customer experiences feels like. We also know that a great customer experience influences our behavior, we want to talk about it with friends and we feel good about doing business with the company that provided it.

We know all this and yet we see time and again examples of poor experiences, just like this Range Rover customer above taking revenge on the company that clearly did not create the right car ownership experience. Why does this happen?

In our work with clients we have found a number of key reasons:

1. Culture – culture drives everything in an organization.  It creates the expectations for how employees behave. It can be left to chance or actively managed. The culture develops not from what people say is important and valued but by what is visibly shown to be important through the way people behave.

For example many companies say that customers are important but then will make decisions that will directly disadvantage the customer in the interests of the business. Bank fee increases, hidden charges, confusing pricing models are great examples of companies trying increase profits without providing customers with any more value.

This is usually the result of short term profit pressures. The message: customers are important until we need to make our numbers – then all bets are off!

2. Goaling – what’s measured gets done. The metrics a business uses will drive behavior, if none of those metrics include measures that are important to customers, people will not focus on the impact they are having on customers.

3. Hiring – hire people that buy into the company’s mission and actually want to add value and contribute to delivering on it. Specifically put hiring practices in place that filter out those that can’t connect their work with customers. Test potential employee’s mindsets, do they have customer friendly skills like the ability to listen, accept feedback, empathize with other people’s positions.

4. Silos – silos can be great, they drive efficiency and specialize expertise but when they become too competitive and an “us and them” mentally develops collaboration is crushed and customers will suffer.

So what do companies with strong customer experiences do right?

Improving the customer experience is about changing a company’s culture.

Companies that can achieve a customer culture take improving the customer experience as seriously as improving financial outcomes.

Our studies of organizations around the globe that have built strong customer cultures have revealed some major themes:

Strong and visible leadership

Leaders are not only committed to the customer experience but also able to instill that commitment in the rest of the organization. There are usually two primary  leaders involved in the process – a CEO or business unit leader who sets the vision and a head of strategy or customer experience who helps execute the strategy. In addition a guiding coalition or customer engagement council that brings in representatives of the broader leadership team it established to oversee progress.

These leaders commit to changing the way they do things in a way that sends the right message to the organization – that customers are important.

A clear mission, vision, and values

A clear purpose beyond “profitable growth”, one that actually does inspire and connect with people emotionally and is contextualized in a customer frame is crucial. This should drive a clear set of behavior standards that capture the intent of the organization and create accountability for customer service and the customer experience among staff members. Amazon’s mantra is “save customers money” and it drives everything (more on this here)

These are not just words on a page. Rather, companies must reinforce these beliefs and behaviors at employee inductions, coffee talks  and the regular team meetings. Companies should use real customer examples to ensure that the mission, vision, and standards resonate throughout the organization.

Customer Immersion

In larger organizations people get disconnected from customers, they lose site of the value being created and what its actually like to be a customer. A process of regular customer immersion sessions helps executives and employees regain that connection. This may include call center sessions, customer visits, bringing customers into internal planning sessions and so on.

Consistent Communication

All messages should incorporate customer focused elements so that managers and staff see the customer experience as a strategic objective that is as important as other financial outcomes. It’s essential that companies consistently communicate what constitutes the right customer experience not only in the strategic plan but also in job descriptions and performance evaluations.

Buy-in from all staff

Defining the reasons for the change and the personal value of being involved in a customer culture change initiative is crucially important. All staff need to understand the reason for the shift in focus and how it will benefit both customers and the business. Staff then ultimately need to see it is in their own self interest to change the way they go about their work.

A way to measure culture change

External and internal measures can be used to assess whether a company is actually changing, the image below shows the relationship between the internal measure of “Customer Culture” relates to the external measure of customer satisfaction and ultimately profit growth.

Customer Culture Foundation Pyramid

A customer culture can be measured using the Market Responsiveness Index which allows companies to see the progress they are making against a benchmark of companies around the world.

A message to leaders

Improving the customer experience is about changing a company’s culture. This change is the most powerful, legacy-defining step a leader can take to improve the performance of a business and the engagement of employees. Senior executives must not only take responsibility to make the customer experience a priority but also must allocate the necessary time and resources to make it a reality.

While there is work involved, it does not necessarily need to be expensive and the payoffs are enormous.  Show me any massively successful company in almost any industry and 8 out of 10 times they have a strong foundation based on a customer culture.

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Posted in Culture Change and Social Media, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity, Employee Engagement, market culture, Market Culture in Action, Market Culture Inaction, MRI

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4 ways customer centric leaders demonstrate they care

Posted on September 25, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Customer Centric CEOs

It is a well known fact in the marketing world that many customers decide to do business with other organizations simply because they believed the company did not care about their business. It’s a feeling, not a product characteristic or benefit deficiency that can often drive customers away. On a purely rationale level it makes no sense, they got what they paid for, why not continue doing business with the same company?

This same concept undoubtedly applies to the leadership of customer centric organizations. Leaders that really care about their employees and their customers demonstrate this through their actions.

Some great lessons come from Rick Silva, the CEO of a quick service restaurant chain called Checkers and Rally. Based primarily on the East Coast and South of the United States the chain first came to my attention through the show “Undercover Boss”.

CEO of Checkers and Rally's rick silva in "Undercover Boss"

Lesson 1: DEMONSTRATE you actually CARE.

“People are our most important asset” is a cliche often used by many leaders but it is not usually followed up with specifics. If people are your most important asset what are you doing to demonstrate that? What culture have you created, are people respected for the value they bring? Is collaboration seen as an important capability that is role modelled from the top?

Rick Silva was undercover at one of his 200 restaurants when he observed the manager of the store barking orders at staff, the environment was tense, one based on fear rather than hope. Rick could tell pretty quickly the culture in that store was toxic. He decided to shut the store down then and there.

Lesson 2: If its NOT GOOD ENOUGH for CUSTOMERs stop doing it and GET IT RIGHT!

The other side of the story is the impact on customers, Rick could see the results first hand of a poor store environment. In his case this meant slow service, poor quality food and lack luster customer interactions. Basically in the quick service restaurant business if staff don’t want to be there eventually customers won’t want to be there either.

Lesson 3: Give your employees WHAT THEY NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL.

The next day Rick visited a new store, one with a high energy customer focused manager. She would go out of her way to make sure customers were happy but was hamstrung by something as simple as an intercom system that actually worked. It was almost impossible to hear the orders from customers on the intercom, something Rick experienced first hand while working to drive through ordering system.

Lesson 4: PEOPLE WANT TO BE HEARD.

Be brave enough to solicit and act on feedback. Many leaders are afraid to get honest feedback from employees, they don’t want to open a “can of worms” or distract them from their work. The reality is employees want to be heard by their leadership. Our company conducts many internal surveys and interviews as part of our consulting practice and it is amazing to see the participation rates and length of open ended responses we often receive.

Rick Silva in “Undercover Boss” was told by one of his employees that staff on the shop floor should participate and be rewarded for a job well done in the same way managers were recognized. Rick listened, recognized that the need made sense for employees and the business and took action to build an incentive program for all employees.

Are you willing to listen and take action?

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Posted in C-Level Quotes on MarketCulture, Cross-functional Collaboration, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity, Employee Engagement, leadership, Market Culture in Action, Market Culture Inaction

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Why social media matters to customer centric businesses: Death by a thousand cuts

Posted on September 21, 2012 by | 2 comments

Much has been written about the impact of social media on corporations and yet many still dismiss it as a distraction.

The “United Break Guitars” video has now been viewed more than 12 million times. For those not familiar with this story, United Airlines passenger Dave Carroll had his guitar destroyed by the airline’s baggage handlers during a flight. After a battle with United for reimbursement and repeated rejections, he wrote a song decrying their poor customer service. (See video below)

So what?

I have heard a number of commentators suggest this incident has really not made a blip on the radar screen of United’s business. While others have argued it actually cost them a fortune.

I think the answer lies somewhere in between these positions. I did not stop flying United after seeing the clip but at the same time it did further diminish my opinion of them and how they run their business. As competition enters the market such as Virgin America I am more interested in considering these alternatives and what they have to offer.  The social media impact of hearing about negative experiences reinforces my perception United really does not care about retaining my custom and makes me open to hear about alternatives.

So while bad experiences like these shared on social media don’t necessarily change short term behavior they do reinforce a negative brand position for companies that is very difficult to reverse. They are constantly swimming upstream against waves of customer dissatisfaction.

For me I see negative social media as more like a “death by a thousand cuts”, it creates a slow but consistent erosion of a Brand’s reputation that increases its costs to acquire new customers and puts at risk its existing customer relationships.

Essentially it is amplified “negative word of mouth” so while the impact and influence of this will vary across the customer base, it is hard to argue it will not have an impact.

The bottom line

It does not have to cost more to do the right thing for your customers. Avoid the slow death of negative sentiment and instead give customers something positive to talk about, it will be like floating downstream…

What do you think the impact of social media has been on business?

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Posted in Customer Centric Culture, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity, Social Media Marketing, viral video

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Customer Metrics: Measure what matters most to customers

Posted on September 13, 2012 by | 10 comments

Key Customer Metrics

As business leaders we tend to pay a lot of attention to the metrics important to the business, that is, revenue, cash flow, profitability, growth and so on… but the real drivers of these business outcomes are customers.

So the obvious question becomes what customer metrics should I be tracking to make sure my business metrics continue to head in the right direction?

Well there are a number of key customer metrics that must be considered for every business:

1. Customer Satisfaction

As a first step it is important to track customer satisfaction, this will provide some inputs as to how well the business is performing on delivering what it promises. But remember customers have already paid for satisfaction, they expect to get what they paid for. So high levels of dissatisfaction are an obvious and immediate cause for concern.

Satisfaction is not enough, even highly satisfied customers can and do switch to alternatives so it is important to also look at Loyalty and Advocacy. That brings me to the next question (Fred Reinhold calls the “Ultimate Question“) How likely are you to recommend us? Loyal customers not only bring you repeat business, they also expand your customer base through positive word-of-mouth.

2.Net Promoter Score

The net promoter score is a simple tool designed to identify 3 types of customers, promoters (advocates with strong positive word of mouth),  detractors (negative word of mouth) and those in the middle. The goal is to drive up the number of promoters as a way of driving business growth.

Many of the most customer-focused businesses in the world use NPS, see below a list of the current top 10 Netpromoter scores in the US:

USAA – Banking = 87%
Trader Joe’s = 82%
Wegman’s = 78%
USAA – Homeowners Insurance = 78%
Costco = 77%
USAA – Auto Insurance = 73%
Apple = 72%
Publix = 72%
Amazon.com = 70%
Kohl’s = 70%

Source: Satmatrix

3. Customer Value Analysis

This is a more advanced metric specifically looking at the value a customer places on what you offer. Value consists of an equation that includes CUSTOMER PERCEPTIONS  of price,  service and product quality. Customer value analysis looks directly at how customers view your business vs. your competition and provides you with valuable information on what you might need to adjust in terms of both product and service quality, as well as price, to increase market share and revenue.

4. Life Time Value of Customers

I talk about this in some more detail in these two posts:

Part 1: Understanding Lifetime Value of Customers

Part 2: Calculating Lifetime Value of Customers – a simple example

Something not covered however was some of the inputs to Customer Lifetime Value which in themselves are useful metrics:

Customer Acquisition metrics include customer awareness levels, the information sources customer use to make purchase decisions, and cost of acquiring a customer.

Churn (%)  measures how many customers are leaving, that is, customer attrition.  Churn is a commonly used metric related to customer retention. Specifically, this is about knowing how many customers are defecting and why.

Customer Complaints are usually an early warning signal that something is wrong. Most customers will not complain they will just take their business elsewhere. Complaints although often difficult to hear are a gift that can help course correct.

5. Your own Customer Culture

How customer obsessed is your organization? How would you know?

This is the question we received from a CEO of a Global 1000 company a number of years ago. It led us to the development of the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) to answer that very question.

This is an organization-wide metric design to measure the behavior of employees and the level of attention they pay to customers in their daily work.

It is a one of a kind tool that allows you to benchmark your company versus the best in the world, you can check it out here.

What Criteria should I use when deciding on Customer Metrics?

  1. The metric drives business results
  2. The metric correlates strongly with business results
  3. The metric is something you can influence
  4. The metric can be measured accurately
  5. The metric can be measured consistently
  6. The metric can be measured cost effectively
  7. All the stakeholders agree the metrics meet these criteria

Ultimately you want to choose the right metrics for your specific business, they should be tailored to the unique business drivers and business strategy.

Why implement customer metrics?

Tracking customer metrics is important for many reasons, but the most important reason is cultural. It gets everyone on the same page, aligns people across the different parts of the business, and leads to a customer-focused culture of success. You should celebrate wins when a key customer metric reaches a new and important milestone. Choosing the right metrics and celebrating progress against them are incredibly important to building a strong customer culture that can work together and grow rapidly.

What customer metrics are you using?

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Posted in Collaboration, Cross-functional Collaboration, Customer Advocacy, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Metrics, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity, Life Time Value, Market Driven, Silos, Voice of the Customer

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3 reasons customer feedback is more critical now than ever

Posted on February 14, 2012 by | 1 comment

15 seconds of feedback!

1. Feedback ready or not

In the past we spent a lot of time talking with clients about the need to draw out feedback from customers. Complaints were a gift, an opportunity to improve and beat the competition.

These days for most businesses there is more than enough feedback from sites like yelp and a multitude of other industry specific sites.

Whether you want to hear what customers think or not, they want to share their experiences and do on a massive scale.

2. It takes 15 seconds or less

In terms of reaching out to customers for specific feedback, one of the barriers was low response rates as customer were indifference or just did not see any value in spending their time to provide feedback.

This is changing with innovations like feefo which promises customers it will only take “15 seconds or less to provide feedback”.

How do they do this? They focus their questions only on the feedback their clients must have an can do something about. Plus there is a payoff for the customer. The customer can see what other people said about their experiences of the service, the good, bad and ugly instantly plus any responses from the company.

This is a real time customer feedback loop that is incredibly powerful.

We know from our research that one of the key drivers of customer centricity relates to how well a company operationalizes this customer feedback loop

The impact of improvements in this capability is very significant. Companies in our Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) database that do this well deliver a 6.5% increase in profit growth over those that perform at the average level. No bad for improving one element of customer focus.

3. Your competition is listening to your customers

Regardless of whether you choose to aggressively drive customer feedback programs or not you can be sure that your competition is working on ways to gather insights into your customer base.

There are a multitude of tools available for competitors to analyze your customer base

Here is a presentation from Sean of Cascade Insights outlining some of the ways to track the competition.

Can you afford to keep ignoring your customers?

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Posted in Competitor Insight, customer focus, Customer Insight, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer-Centricity

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How much is poor customer experience costing you?

Posted on November 9, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Source: Genesys Research: "The cost of poor customer service"

Genesys conducted research to determine some of the hard costs associated with provision of poor service in the US.

They found than $83 billion annually is either lost to competitors or lost for good as consumers are so turned off they don’t buy at all.

“More than 65% of consumers have ended
relationships there due to poor customer service. And,
while 61% of those relationships end up with a competitor,
39% of them are lost or abandoned completely
as consumers decide not to purchase from anyone.”

So why are customers leaving?

Some of the reasons mentioned in the report by consumers were:
• Having to repeat themselves
• Being trapped in automated self-service
• Forced to wait too long for service
• Representatives don’t know my history and value

Add to this other research that has shown the number one reason customers leave a business is because they believe the business simply does not care about them and their business.

Solutions?

The number 1 factor involved in a great customer experience cited by the Genesys research was an interaction with a competent, knowledgeable customer service person. I would add to this a customer service person that actually cares about getting the right outcome for the customer.

Do all of your staff understand the importance of great customer service? If it costs businesses $83 billion a year, how many jobs could it save?

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Posted in customer focus, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity

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Are you focused on your customer’s profit producing behaviors?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Show me the money!Do you know which of your customers are profit producers?

It’s a great way to think about that core group of customers that really drive your business forward. These are typically what we think of as our most loyal customers, our advocates and what they do can be more powerful that the best sales team in the world.

For starters they buy your products more frequently and at higher values that other customers.

Secondly they recommend you, provide feedback, support new products and typically ignore competitive messages.

As a leader in your organization what are you doing to enhance these behaviors? Do you make it easy for your customers to share their stories?

Do you recognize these customers and create unique experiences that provide extra value for them?

Some companies with traditionally poor records on this front are starting to step up in this area namely United Airlines.

United is now delivering more than just frequent flyer points but differentiated experiences for frequent flyers such as more room leg and priority boarding. They are also targeting customers with relevant and timely upgrade options as well a a broader range of flexible options for using points for travel and shopping.

What can you do differently for your best customers?

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Posted in Customer Advocacy, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Value, Customer-Centricity, Marketing ROI

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