Deliver and Measure excerpt Printed in Loyalty Management Magazine
Mindshare President Richard D. Hanks Book Featured as a "Loyalty Read"
What should I aim for?
Your end goal should be generating loyal customers. (There are lots of books and plenty of consultants itching to sell you “their special sauce” to help you transform satisfied
customers into loyal ones.) But I believe good old customer satisfaction should not be left on the side of the road, sacrificed to the enticements of the goal of loyalty. Why?
Because, as I mentioned in the Introduction, my experience has led me to conclude that significantly more companies are failing due to poor execution than are failing due to poor strategy (including a zealous attachment to over-analyzing loyalty).
For example, let’s say that in a seafood restaurant, the most loyal of all customers bites into a piece of greasy, under-cooked fish – suddenly her loyalty evaporates. Larry Loyalty phones a reservations call center to book his next hotel room and is treated so rudely that he never calls again. And, after getting your haircut at the same place for 12 years, you finally can’t take the excruciating wait any longer, so you go to a salon down the street.
Each of these real-life examples illustrates why I wrote this book – because I believe a concerted focus on executing the basics is the single most important thing your business can do today. In simple terms, I think there is more bang for the buck in stopping customers from leaving you in the first place, than in spending your life trying to make them fit some definition of loyalty. There is also more money to be made in customer retention than in new customer acquisition.
That’s why the focus of this book is on real-time feedback, leading to local accountability, and continuously focusing on improving operations – so that you can keep customers coming back long enough to allow them to become emotionally involved – to become loyal!
Mindshare drives operational improvement. Using Mindshare, companies improve operational excellence, foster consumer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and support employee retention. Our industry experts guide clients in building comprehensive enterprise feedback management (EFM) solutions. Mindshare's proprietary survey technology captures the voice of the customer in real-time and immediately transforms it into actionable intelligence through powerful and incisive reporting. Mindshare serves more than 25 different industries including travel, hospitality, restaurant, financial, salon, automotive, and retail. For information, visit www.mshare.net.
