Driving Customer Loyalty

We all know that customer loyalty is a good thing. After all, you spent money to acquire that customer somewhere in the past, and you’d like to keep him or her. Or, another customer referred said customer to you, and you’d still like to keep him or her.

Of all people, Comcast, the cable provider, wrote an article on driving customer loyalty that’s pretty good: one is tempted remark that they should take their own medicine, but that’s another story.

But the points of the Comcast article are pretty good, and struck me as something that you don’t see every day.

1. Use the Cloud as an Accelerator. By this they mean that one should use the cloud to tell customer stories to tie the customer to the provider. The examples are retail, but we’ve observed that this approach can work in B2B as well: blogs, Linked In, maybe Facebook and Twitter, all can help in customer loyalty.

2. Gather Feedback for Fine Turing. Use online channels for direct customer feedback, whether retail or b2b. Monitoring the same channels as item #1 can help. And, the next point is what to do about the feedback.

3. Offer ‘Instantaneous Information. To us, this means engaging on the web with useful content, and engaging with customers through their feedback. It’s timecosuming, and probably will need a lot of marketing time, but if customer retention is improved, it’s probably worth it. Try it and find out, and hope your people give you good feedback.

4. How Bandwidth Powers Your Presence. All this requires bandwidth, which is a not-too subtle ad for Comcast and their online solutions, but their point is valid. You can’t run programs like the ones above in the digital age on dial-up. How much bandwidth you need is a good question, since you generally take what one of the providers offers. Faster is better.

So, above are four things to consider in building customer loyalty through online means. Let us know how it works.

 

 

This entry was posted in customer service, Entrepreneurship, focus groups, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Sales, social media, social media marketing and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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