The Road to Customer Loyalty

July 30, 20101 Comment

Most successful businesses recognise that a crucial part of their strategy for achieving long-term business growth is through nurturing their key accounts, thus ensuring that they become and remain committed loyal customers.

Long-term commitments derive from building relationships with our customer contacts that strengthen and deepen as a result of actions (improve service quality or provide the customer with recognised added value) we take. You can think of this process as being analogous to depositing positive value into a “trust and confidence account” that we have with the customer concerned.

The Client Review Process

 TRS apply a Client Review process or tool (designed and managed by E.G. Insight[1]), which provides us with a statement on the trust and confidence accounts for customers who TRS bring into the review program. The Client Review process is a straightforward concept but is one that requires excellence in execution.

The review process provides us with the detail of our “withdrawals” (weaknesses, failures to meet customer expectations) as well as the “deposits” or strengths (areas of service quality excellence) for the customer concerned. The bottom-line balance on the statement is a measure of the overall confidence (percentage measure) that the customer has in our service. The tool also helps us to better understand the customer’s future needs as well as changes affecting their organisation and industry.

How it Works

To carry out the client review process TRS conduct face-to-face interviews with our important customers. Interviews are typically one hour long and interviewers use a structured interview guide.

During a review interviewers must be confident and competent in the following skills; they must listen attentively, question effectively, and record the client’s conversation accurately. Following the review interviewers must also show skill in identifying actions that can be taken to address the client’s issues and they must be committed to ensuring actions are implemented.

Most important of all, interviewers need to provide feedback to the client reviewed. The feedback includes thanking the client for taking the time to participate, communicating what we have understood as issues to be addressed and our intentions for resolving them.  The follow through is to then take measurable and observable actions which close out the issues identified and then provide further feedback to the customer so that they link the action and improvement as an experience that has resulted from the review process. In this way we successfully make further deposits into our trust and confidence account with the customer.

The Client Relationship Hierarchy

Over time the accumulating deposits in our trust and confidence account change the way in which our customer sees us. Within the client review process this is known as moving up the client relationship hierarchy. The hierarchy is illustrated below.

Where we choose to be on the above hierarchy is intentional. It is impractical and impossible to resource all accounts at the same level. Strategy and thoughtful planning dictate which customer accounts should be treated as transactional relationships (price driven and therefore in the lower-half of the hierarchy; a defensive strategy) and those which are or should be relationship-driven (value driven and therefore in the top half of the hierarchy; an offensive strategy.)  

In the end, no matter what resources we apply, the customer determines how they perceive us and our service. A customer’s attitude may change adversely if our service becomes more expensive due to an adverse economic climate, and the customer may consequently choose to go elsewhere for the service.

For our most important customers, we want to build relationships that reflect high levels of confidence in our services. To do this we need to move from meeting and / or exceeding customer expectations into the upper part of the hierarchy above, where we are seen as a solution providers and / or a trusted

We use the review process to trigger significant experiences (actions and resultant improvements) that a customer then associates as a result of participating in the review. We:

1)      talk to the customer and discover TRS service strengths and weaknesses,

2)      take appropriate improvement action and then through continual feedback to the customer, and,

3)      ensure that the action taken and resulting improvement, is linked by the customer as an experience or benefit derived from the review. This process is illustrated below.

 No Shortcuts!

There are no shortcuts to moving up the hierarchy. With each new customer we start at or near the bottom, i.e. meeting our customer’s requirements then intentionally work our way to the desired level of relationship with the customer. It’s hard work all the way, but with the right tools, such as the Client Review process—integrated with effective business processes and supported by competent, enthusiastic and committed staff—TRS are confident of continuing to achieve their goal of long term growth supported by loyal customers who are happy and confident to rely on TRS as their partner and trusted advisor.

 

[1] See http://www.eginsight.com/index.php for further details on E.G. Insight


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Wordpress Themes on August 4, 2010 2:43 am

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