Cultivating Your Customers — Building customer retention and loyalty

How much more are your customers willing to pay for great customer service?

by Mark Price on May 16, 2011

In a recent American Express survey, close to 70% of respondents said they would pay an average of 13% more for excellent customer service. That result is a significant increase from last year, as customers become more frustrated by customer service from the companies they patronize.

At the same time, over 85% of respondents believe that American companies are not increasing focus on customer service.

Who will be the first in your industry to take that extra 13% in revenue and all those customers who are so angry?

Now you have the high level business case to drive discussions.

Amplify’d from www.livescience.com

Americans Mouth Off About Poor Customer Service

In the survey, seven out of ten respondents said they’re willing to spend an average of 13 percent more with businesses that they feel provide excellent customer service. That number is up substantially from last year, when just 58 percent said they were willing to spend 9 percent more for great service.

Despite consumer’s clear desire for better customer service, most feel businesses aren’t placing a high enough priority on it. According to the survey, 60 percent believe businesses haven’t increased their focus on providing good customer service, with 26 percent thinking businesses are paying less attention to it.

Bad customer service gets many Americans’ blood boiling, according to a new survey out this week — with more than half saying they have lost their temper and one in five men firing off a few choice expletives during frustrating service situations.

Read more at www.livescience.com

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Be Careful What You Ask For — A Cautionary Groupon tale

by Mark Price on May 15, 2011

Many companies are flocking to Groupon, lured by the promise of soaring sales and lots of new customers. Yet nothing is as good as it seems.

A recent study showed that customers brought in on a Groupon promotion are less loyal, less likely to repeat and spend as much money as regular customers. What is more, 1/3 of companies using Groupon do not make any money from the promotion at all.

Finally, the surge in traffic and transactions due to Groupon can negatively impact relationships with Best Customers, who are the revenue and profit lifeblood of the business.

This article details the threats presented by a Groupon promotion and how companies can mitigate that risk with their Best Customers and their business in general.

Amplify’d from www.destinationcrm.com

Maintaining Customer Loyalty

How to ensure Groupon and Living Social won’t damage relationships

There is little argument that Groupon, Living Social, and the endless stream of copycat flash sale sites are fundamentally changing the dynamics of how businesses market and advertise new goods and services. Many small and large businesses have enthusiastically embraced these discount services for their ability to attract scores of new customers and generate heavy sales in a short period of time. But not all are performing sufficient analysis on how the acquisition of a large volume of new customers during and after a discount can negatively impact loyalty, goodwill and retention of existing customers.

Weighing a discount sale service’s impact on both current and newly acquired customers is critical, particularly in light of a 2010 study by Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business that finds that one-third of businesses don’t make money from Groupon promotions, and that consumers using Groupon don’t make return visits, spend as much money or provide the same level of tips as the broader customer base.

Read more at www.destinationcrm.com

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7 Warning Signs Your Customers May Be Deserting You

May 2, 2011

You come into the office one morning, and within minutes, your stomach starts to get queasy. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something is wrong. Are you losing customers, especially best customers? Before Sales starts grumbling and the CEO comes by for an explanation, look for these 7 key warning signs that [...]

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Forget your most important customer?

May 2, 2011

We have always known how important it is to communicating well internally in order to help make the sales and operations teams more customer-centric. You can do all the data-mining in the world, develop stunning, game-changing insights, and it can all fall flat in the field (and often does). This analysis, from South Africa, is [...]

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Does data-driven decision-making work?

April 24, 2011

You bet. Recently, a study at the Wharton School demonstrated that companies that adopt “data-driven decision-making” average 5-6% high productivity than those that did not. The academics studied 179 large companies and found that data-driven decision making was often the difference between success and poor performance in their industries. Here is what the study does [...]

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Best Customers – Grow or Save first?

April 22, 2011

Most times, when we discuss the nurturing of Best Customers, we focus on expanding relationships and share of wallet. After all, when we are successful, we can see clear increases in revenue and profit. But a recent post on the SurveyMethods blog suggests that we might be better served by focusing on saving customers at [...]

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Customer loyalty — does anyone care?

April 21, 2011

Bruce Temkin, of the Temkin Group, just released his 2011 report on customer loyalty. Of the 143 companies surveyed, only 24 or 17% received a strong or very strong loyalty rating. The rest were average or below average. Among the top performers were retailers; the lowest performers included health plans, banks, cable and internet providers. [...]

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Data is only valuable when you use it

April 20, 2011

We all know that we need to collect customer feedback and use it to improve our processes to drive increased conversion rates, retention and loyalty. Then why are so few of us doing so? A recent article on MarketingWeb highlighted that close to 95% of large companies were collecting data, yet only 10% use the [...]

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2 Ways to Make Money On The Phone

April 1, 2011

No one focusses more on customer satisfaction than American Express. AmEx has recently invested heavily in their contact center, in order to personalize customer experience on the phone. AmEx recently took all the controls off their reps, allowing them to spend as long on the phone with a customer as the customer wishes. They also [...]

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