Why your customers are no longer loyal

 

By DENNIS OTIENO

Summary

• Organisations strive to provide the best customer service to their clients, not only to ensure they end up happy, but loyal as well.
• And when the client is loyal or not, the impact is always obvious and far reaching.
• But as conscience for good customer service continues being part of today’s businesses, less customers are becoming loyal to brands.
• The most loved brand today may end up being the least likeable tomorrow.

Shep Hyken, a customer service expert once said, “Customer service is what you and your company provide. Customer loyalty is the result of that service”. The biggest asset of any organisation is its brand. And the ambassadors of this brand are always expected, or at least hoped to be the day to day customer.

Organisations strive to provide the best customer service to their clients, not only to ensure they end up happy, but loyal as well. And when the client is loyal or not, the impact is always obvious and far reaching.

But as conscience for good customer service continues being part of today’s businesses, less customers are becoming loyal to brands. The most loved brand today may end up being the least likeable tomorrow. This is the reality with today’s customer, thus raising the question, why are businesses struggling to rely on client loyalty?

1. It is not the company, it is the customer needs

As blunt as it may seem, the reality is that customers are never loyal to companies, they are loyal to the source of the satisfactions of their emotional and rational needs. When this source changes, so does their allegiance.

In other words, the customer is currently with you because you satisfy a certain important need that they have. When the need changes, your business ceases to be relevant to them, and they move on to the next company whose solutions are current to their needs.

A buffalo is only interested in the grass in the field, not the field itself.

When the grass dries up, the buffalo will quickly move to the next green field and so on. This is an exact replica of the modern day customer.

It is therefore critical that the organisation keeps engaging their clients on a continuous basis, to find out if the need of the client is changing and if there is need to modify, improve or overhaul the products and services offered.

2. End of monopolies

And then came the decline of monopolistic companies. Customers now have a variety of choices and solutions to their needs and are no longer prisoners to “too big to fail” companies of the yester-centuries.

Monopolistic businesses have nothing to lose, and with or without fair pricing or exceptional customer service their sales, and thus profits and existence, were assured. Customers have no alternative, but to buy their products and services.

Most markets are now liberal and expanded. Consequently, power has shifted from businesses to customers. Buyers have more control of how and where to spend their money.

With several companies offering similar solutions, customer loyalty is now dictated by the level of satisfaction offered by the various options available to them.

3. Service standards are not changing, customer expectations are

Like a baby fascinated by a new toy, so are clients with their service provider’s level of customer service. Once they get used to it and nothing new is forthcoming, familiarity starts to override the love.

4. Continuous improvement is key

The key to ensuring customer loyalty is through continuous improvement of the service levels and offering pleasant surprises to the customers.

However great the customer service levels are in an organisation, without continuous improvement, familiarity will breed contempt and the very absolute solutions of today will becoming obsolete the next day.

By continuously improving the standards of customer service, the business will ensure that they match the ever escalating customer expectations. The results will lead to a drop in number of customer complaints, as well as to an improvement of customer loyalty.

However outstanding an organisation’s customer service may be, without continuous improvement the ever rising expectations will eventually catch up.

Stagnating customer service is one of the reasons why some great companies go wrong, as competitors are every day working towards improving on the quality of delivery.

While a particular organisation’s efforts may not have dropped, rising expectations may create a misconception of complacency in customer service. If at any time buyer expectations exceed what the business can convey, it could be a sign that your customer service is wanting. Customer expectations is progressive in nature.

The author is a banker, customer service consultant and the author of ‘The Age of the Here-And-Now Customer”