Building customer’s loyalty

Most companies spend large amount of money to come up with all type of plans and offers as to delight their customers. However, they rarely examine the real behavior of a customer.

Consumers’ impulse to punish bad service—at least more readily than to reward delightful service—plays out dramatically in both phone-based and self-service interactions, which are most companies’ largest customer service channels. In those settings, our research shows, loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be.

So stop trying to delight your customers and think about making your product solve their problems.

3 Comments

Add your comment

• 
  # Leon
  says on July 28

  This is bizarre, Amrinder. My work colleague’s writing a blog post at this very moment on this paper (very much from a work, customer service manager perspective), but I came across your post via my own feed reader.

  Anyway, he only agrees to an extent; certain products don’t need to delight but, on the whole, providing top class service — with the bells and whistles — does result in customer loyalty and return business.

  I’ll add a link once we publish it.

  — Leon

• 
  # Amrinder
  says on July 28

  @Leon: I agree with your point but first preference should be to provide best possible service on existing product. Once that’s done, you can try all sorts of customer delighting tricks.

• 
  # Leon
  says on August 04

  For reference, here’s my colleague’s response:

  http://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/1711-5562/Time-to-stop-delighting-your-customers.html