What's the key to keeping customers loyal during the downturn? A new report from Forrester Research says it all comes down to showing that you care. "Customer experience" is the top determinant of customer loyalty right now, the research says. Bruce Temkin, VP and principal analyst, customer experience, at Forrester, and author of the report, says that these days, "Customers will do more business with companies that serve them best." Period.
The Forrester report measures loyalty by a customer's willingness to repurchase from a company, reluctance to switch companies and likelihood to recommend a company, according to a recent article at DM News. Customer experience is measured by whether the company meets a customer's needs, whether the company is easy to work with and the "enjoyability" of a consumer's interactions with the company.
So who won? There were three companies whose customer experiences were most linked to loyalty in the report. Office Depot led in customer willingness to repurchase. US Airways was the winner in reluctance to switch, and Charter Communications scored in likelihood to recommend.
"[I]n down times, customers become even more alert to the way they're being treated and get even more sensitive to the experiences they have, so that was the big 'a-ha!' from the research this year," Temkin concludes.
The Po!nt: Make time to take time; give your customers that special TLC. "[I]n this economic environment, every purchase [consumers] make, every service interaction they have, is a large portion of what they care about," Temkin notes.
Source: Forrester Research and DM News. Read the report and the article.
by Christina "CK" Kerley
Comments
by Stewart Wed Mar 11, 2009
I think your point about customer experience is right on the money. I know that Tom Peters has been talking about the importance of customer experiences for a while and I think he even had a chapter on it in his latest book, Re-imaine!
I was also reading an article about the Herb Chambers auto dealership chain in New England. The article I read (February 2008 issue of Autodealer magazine) states that Herb Chambers used to pay a great deal of attention to all the sales training programs, but over the past few years, he has realized that "the key to sales is simply being nice to people." Maybe more people could learn from that.
by Paula Thu Mar 12, 2009
Fabulous article, and very timely for me as I just had a fabulous CS experience this week and had been thinking about the role of CS in the current economic climate.
I featured your article in a post on my blog. You can find it here:
http://boogersandburps.blogspot.com/2009/03/thriftilicious-thursdayas-our-savings.html
As always, fascinating stuff!