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Over the past dozen years American corporations have come to recognize that much of their financial
success is dependent upon retaining their current customers, and in developing and strengthening their positive attitudes
and behaviors. Such “customer loyalty” manifesting itself as:
- Repurchases
- Higher Share
of Category Spending (Increase tenure, cross-sell, upsell)
- Positive Word of Mouth
Retention and customer loyalty have become popular themes and top objectives
within many corporate boardrooms. An entire industry has grown with suppliers ready to sell tactical solutions to corporations.
In their quest for improved customer loyalty corporations have pushed forward with a variety
of different initiatives. For example:
–Putting more people on the phones,
buying the latest CRM software, training employees to be more engaged, awarding frequent flyer points, etc. (Such approaches
likely “won’t hurt” - but they can be expensive and frequently don’t deliver an acceptable return
on investment.) –Measuring satisfaction . ( Leading to setting standards for improvement. Message often
interpreted as “fix everything”, diluting precious resources, and leading to frustration and confusion -
and often no real action.) –Benchmarking others and addressing the same problems as those leaders. (Resulting
in improvements, but not necessarily in the areas that are most meaningful in their marketplace or with their best customers.)
Any one of these approaches likely will do some good, but corporations need
to spend their budgets on the strategies and tactics that will do the most good. While such approaches may have worked
in the past, in a dynamic marketplace competitive activities and customer needs frequently have changed. Previously selected
priorities and tactics may be sub-optimal and delivering less than acceptable ROI.
Customer Experience Partners addresses the challenge by
providing an objective review of the changing customer needs and company performance. We re-calibrate the understanding
of the experience being delivered and guide our clients as they re-adjust their retention efforts to optimize retention spending
and thereby to operate more profitably. We:
1. Generate a totally objective understanding
of the complete customer experience. (Including every point of contact from interactions with staff, to
billing, sensual reactions to the environments you provide, corporate image, marketing communications, etc.)
2. Capture customer feedback from a representative sample from each actionable segment about the touchpoints and their components,
analyze the data, and identify the most critical gaps occurring compared to the competition at the most important touchpoints.
3. Provide a visual presentation of the company channels and their interactions over a year in the life of their
customer.
4. Determine how well the company image and brand associations are aligned with the brand promise. Identify which
companies your customers think do a better job of handling each of the most important touchpoints and what the client
needs to do to be thought of as performing better.
5. Present findings and facilitate the creation of strategies
and tactics that will (because they are targeted to the most significant gaps) deliver the greatest ROI in terms of retention,
increased share of category purchases, and positive word of mouth.
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