Question

Topic: Customer Behavior

Customer Loyalty And Retention Problem !

Posted by Anonymous on 11/17/2010 at 5:35 AM ET 125 Points
Hello All

In our research, in the Hospitality and Retail Industry, particularly in the Small and medium sized companies, we found that companies do not know if their customers are loyal to their products and services, and don't know if these loyal customers are bringing in referrals, what are the top root causes of loyal and unhappy customers and the Cost Vs Benefit in converting unhappy customer to loyal ones.

Just wanted to ask your opinion, if an Internet based software that can help these SMBs to measure and improve customer loyalty is something Marketing Managers/Brand Managers will be interested in? willing to pay for such a service ?

Thank You
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 11/17/2010 at 7:13 AM Moderator
    When you say it will "help" with those measurements, you need to be very specific. I "help" companies when, as a consumer, I watch their ads on television. I also "help" them when, as a consultant, I develop new product concepts that can make them millions of dollars. Are those "helps" worth the same amount? (Rhetorical question. Of course not.)

    So it really depends on what exactly you're promising and delivering, and how much it's worth to a potential customer. And it depends on how many of those SMBs you need in order to consider yourself successful. If two is enough, then it's probably a good idea. If it's two million, then it's going to be a real challenge. Somewhere between those extremes is that magic cut-off point where the answer to your question goes from "no" to "yes."
  • Posted on 11/17/2010 at 7:35 AM Author
    Thanks for responding. Let me elaborate on this.

    We are building an Internet software which is a combination of Survey and Customer Intelligence engine. Surveys will serve as an input to the Intelligence Engine, which will further generate actionable customer insights (tabular and graphical reports). Insights such as why customers love your product, why dislike, do you have promoters for your product, can you increase this population because customer recommendation is a great way to spread the news around, Cost Vs Benefit analysis to convert a detractor to promoter and so on. Then action items that can improve loyalty and retention (such as Reduce waiting time of a customer support call, minimize no. of clicks to purchase products online etc), can be created and assigned to an Individual within the company to follow- thru to completion. And re-do these steps after an Interval, if actual results are as per the forecasted results. This is in a nutshell, how we envision the solution to work.

    Did I make it clear now ?
  • Posted on 11/17/2010 at 5:14 PM Accepted
    So this is basically a market research tool with a fancy back-end analysis and reporting format, right? How is it different from/better than the research tools that are out there now?

    I think it will be important to identify and promote the functional advantages of what you have compared to the most sophisticated alternative. You'll want to give your target audience a clear example of how their lives will be better with your tool as compared to what they're able to do today with the tools at their disposal.

    And, FWIW, "actionable analysis" is old-hat. Everyone claims "actionable analysis" and tries to imply that they actually deliver insights. Experienced marketers know that insights are something people get when they ask the right questions and think about the answers to those questions. The insight, more often than not, is a more a function of the question than the answer.

    There are several folks on this forum who are experienced with expert systems, smart analytics, and sophisticated market research. With a little luck you can get a few of them to react to your concept and question. Unfortunately the subject line for your question doesn't let them know what you're asking. It's more about the subject of your solution.
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