Today’s customers are smarter, better informed and more intolerant of being “sold” than ever before. They expect doing business with you to be as hassle-free and gratifying for them as possible. When they experience good service elsewhere, they bring an if-they-can-do-it-why-can’t-you? attitude to their next transaction with you. They believe you earn their business with service that is pleasant, productive and personalized; if you don’t deliver, they’ll leave.
Action Step: Use the customer data you collect through your loyalty program to rank your customers according to lifetime value; we’ll talk more about creating these lists on our Loyalty Countdown #2 post. Using these lists, identify those high-value customers that are most demanding. Next, isolate the needs, expectations and requests that make these customers more demanding than others. Ask yourself: What can we do to upgrade our systems and processes to better provide this high level of performance? Which of our other customers would likely benefit from these upgrades? Let this thinking help guide your development priorities.
Source: Griffin, Jill. Customer Loyalty: How To Earn It How To Keep It. 2002.