A bicycle store that offers an exchange on the original full purchase for as long as you own the bicycle.
An on-line photo sharing service that (has never raised their annual fee since its inception and) gives long-time customers an unsolicited 15% discount just for sticking around.
An airline that makes a point to greet every gold mileage plan passenger by name once they are seated just to make sure they’re settled-in OK.
These are just three examples I have experienced in the past week of companies going out of their way to build customer loyalty. What are you doing, beyond price, to build ferociously loyal customers? Or outside of retail-- to build ferociously loyal distribution partners, subscribers, patients, even citizens?
Monday, October 19, 2009
Building Ferociously Loyal Customers
Posted by Seth Rosenbloom at 4:41 PM
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2 comments:
The service I receive from USAA makes me ferociously loyal. By leaps and bounds, the competence and courtesy of the service center staff is better than any other. When discussing personal finance matters, I want someone who's listening and responding to MY needs, not operating off a script. USAA does it well, most do not.
Recently my mobile phone provider contacted me and offered to upgrade my line (as well as my wife’s line) to an unlimited anytime minutes package, but at the same monthly subscription as before. Why? Because I’d been a long-time customer: about 5.5 years. How could I say no? I didn’t.
On the surface, this may seem like business insanity, but if you have the data about my account, you’d know I’d exceeded my minutes package perhaps 4 or 5 times over the years. My wife has never over run hers. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out the probability of my running over with any frequency. So a calculated risk on the part of my provider in exchange for making me feel valuable to them. Of course, I realized almost immediately their “freebie” was something I was unlikely use (<10% of the months I use the service), but it was still a nice gesture and it reinforced an already high level of satisfaction I had with the service.
The point is there are many ways to provide additional value without having to charge more or incur higher costs. It takes some work to figure it out, but I suspect there are opportunities present in many businesses. The keys are: 1) knowing how and where to look for these opportunities and 2) knowing your customers well enough to understand which will or won’t take advantage of what you’re offering them. Not every incentive need to apply to all customers, but certainly they should apply to your most valuable customers.
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