Key to Creating Loyalty

What cre­ates cus­tomer loy­alty in an instant?

Ser­vice. The type of ser­vice that you give your cus­tomers deter­mines whether they will look for a new provider or stick with you. How is your cus­tomer service?

I know, this all sounds so basic so what’s the point? In the last week, I have expe­ri­enced fan­tas­tic ser­vice and I’ve expe­ri­enced ser­vice that made me so frus­trated I wanted to throw up.

You see in today’s econ­omy cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion is not enough - it’s all about the loy­alty you build with your customers.

Recip­i­ent of Great Cus­tomer Ser­vice and Care

I had to take my car into be ser­viced, because the dreaded ser­vice engine soon light came on. I was in an acci­dent 2 months ago and my fear was it was acci­dent related. I sched­ule the appoint­ment and arrived at the deal­er­ship. They ran diag­nos­tics on the car and told me it looked like they would need to do a smoke test, rather than make me wait they reset the light told me I’d be fine and just call them when it came back on and we would arrange the ser­vice. They would also make arrange­ments with the body shop that fixed it, since it seemed to be acci­dent related, to make sure I did not have to pay out of pocket to have it repaired. The light came back on 3 days later. They sched­uled a time for me to bring the car in and would give me a loaner so I wouldn’t have to drive a rental car. I’m not a snob, but come on a BMW is not a Ford Focus. I dropped the car off on the des­ig­nated day and my ser­vice advi­sor said that he’d call me later that day when the car was ready. He called at about 3:00 PM in the after­noon and told me they would not be done that day — but he had good news the cause of the “ser­vice engine soon” light would be cov­ered under war­ranty. He called the next morn­ing at 9:00 a.m. to tell me the car could be picked up. I arrived the pick up my car, it has been washed, cleaned and ready to go. There was no wait, it was as easy as exchang­ing the loaner car for my car, sign­ing the paper work and dri­ving back to the office.

Truth is the BMW deal­er­ship makes me want to always own a BMW. They’ve earned my loy­alty. They always take care of me and make things easy for me and my sched­ule. Every time I leave the deal­er­ship I’m proud of my car because they deliver it in tip-top shape and look­ing beau­ti­ful. They sim­ply go out of their way to cre­ate a fan­tas­tic cus­tomer experience.

Ready for my bad experience?

I pur­chase soft­ware all the time to stay on top of the trends and make sure that I’m being as effi­cient as I can be. I pur­chased a soft­ware item recently and it did not work accord­ing to what was adver­tised. I needed the soft­ware to com­plete a project and since it did not work I had to find another solu­tion. This caused me to have to pur­chase another prod­uct. I wrote the first com­pany regard­ing my dis­ap­point­ment, was answered 72 hours later with sug­ges­tions on fix­ing the prob­lem. How many of you could wait 72 hours to solve a prob­lem? I couldn’t which is why I had to pur­chase the sec­ond soft­ware prod­uct. I asked for a refund, explained the issue and the time sen­si­tiv­ity for a solu­tion and I was told I would not get a refund — that was not their pol­icy. I will not pur­chase another soft­ware prod­uct from them, I will not refer their prod­ucts to any one and more than likely I’ll detour any one from pur­chas­ing from them. They’ve not only lost any chance at cre­at­ing loy­alty with a cus­tomer, but they’ve cre­ated the worst case sce­nario which is neg­a­tive word-of-mouth marketing.

What can you do to improve your ser­vice and cre­ate cus­tomer loyalty?

Go out of your way and cre­ate an expe­ri­ence with each and every cus­tomer. Make them feel spe­cial not like a num­ber. Do you need a lit­tle added proof that it’s worth it. Con­sider the ben­e­fits that come with loyal customers:

• Repeat purchases
• Increase the vol­ume of what they pur­chase from you
• They will buy across your prod­uct lines
• They will excit­edly refer peo­ple to you
• Your com­pe­ti­tion won’t be able to snag them
• They will always give you the ben­e­fit of the doubt even when some­thing goes wrong

Do you have a story to share about your loy­alty to a spe­cific com­pany? I’d love to hear it.

Tagged as: consumer behavior, customer loyalty, customer relationships, Relationship Marketing