Free Web Seminar: Defending the Loyalty Function: Lessons from Chief Customer Officers

Defending the Loyalty Function: Lessons from Chief Customer Officers

Loyalty is elusive, and justifying ROI for loyalty initiatives is even more difficult. Yet, many companies have placed such a premium on customer loyalty that they’ve created a new C-Suite role called the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) to serve as the definitive and authoritative view of customers across the company and to drive customer and corporate strategy at the highest levels of the company.

During this session, you'll learn how to:
1. Quantify the impact disloyal customers can have on your business
2. Measure the success of loyalty initiatives
3. Communicate the value of loyalty in terms understood by the CEO, the CFO, and especially the CCO
4. Enlist the help of the CFO in championing loyalty

Reserve your Webinar seat, mention priority code G1M2200W1BlogLI
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/263968281

Customer Service Basics

Have companies forgotten about how simple and effective thanking customers can be? This post on Get Elastic discusses how appreciated Philip Mikal felt after he received a hand-written thank you note from Rackspace hosting. He even mentions, “A handwritten note and cow bell to celebrate their recent IPO; Rackspace understands that customer service is the new marketing.”

Businesses will have to revert to basic principles this holiday season in order to keep customer loyalty high, especially because of our current economic situation.

How many loyalty cards do you have?

In a recent blog by Robert J. Howard at Customer Think, he addresses the loyalty card subject I'm sure we all have dealt with. How many loyalty cards do you have on your key chain right now? He points out that businesses have overrun the customers' wallets with loyalty cards, and the market is at the point of saturation.

It all began with rewards for airline miles, then hotels, and now it's moved to restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations and to anything imaginable beyond that. So what do customers do with their addiction to their rewards? How do businesses find a way to still reward their customers who frequent their business? Do you have a solution to this current plastic crisis?

Customer Loyalty

A recent article at the blog Customers are Always pointed out the huge difference between a customers having loyalty cards and customers being loyal to stores. Just because a customer has a loyalty card doesn’t mean that they will continually be loyal to this store. To ensure that a customer does stay loyal to your store, you must give them customer service that they want to come back to your store for.

What do you think? Does great customer service automatically guarantee customer loyalty?

Customer Loyalty Programs

This article in Advertising Age discusses the role of loyalty during economic downturns. Hilton Hotel’s senior VP of customer loyalty discussed how the members of the Hilton Honors program are responsible for the current success of Hilton and the chains ability to maintain business. While many view customer loyalty programs an important part of business during economic hardships, some corporations think about cultivating these loyal customers only during troubled times. This blog post raises the interesting point, that there is never a “best” time to encourage engagement in loyalty programs, instead it is important for companies to be constantly conscious of this need. The author of the post made this statement

Let’s consider a simple loyalty lifecycle: (1) Engage customers, (2) build loyalty, (3) reinforce loyal activities. Downturns are the worst time for (1) and (2) because there are fewer customers. It’s the time to really hone in on (3). So if you just start thinking about loyalty during a downturn, it’s too late.

What is your view on customer loyalty programs? Do you think that corporations have not been responsible enough in terms of cultivating consumer loyalty when they don’t have a pressing need for it?