It can be argued that when we talk about a Customer Loyalty of one company, it leads us to an assumption that the magnitude of the index of the Customer Satisfaction of this company must be above average. Unfortunately, the assumption is not acutely supported by clear and strong evidence. Likewise, it hasn’t also been proven that Loyal Customers are willing to sacrifice (at least) their valuable time to promote our product / service / brand.
I would like to see the term of Customer Loyalty in a different perspective, my perspective actually! I may call it a Longitudinal Relation Perspective. Based on my research and experience, I strongly believed that Customer Loyalty starts from and is about Relation, a Longitudinal Relation, I may say. To grow up the relation, there are five (5) aspects that have to be developed: honesty, trust, commitment, integrity and consistency. We must see these aspects as a perpetual effort from every party involved in the company. However, it is not an instant process. It’s an on-going process, and has to be well-organized.
A Longitudinal Relation puts emphasis on how we build a long-lasting, memorable experience in the relation. The relation is similar with husband and wife relation. Start with the question of ‘Do our loyalty to marriage depend on how satisfactory is our spouse or on how often we praise our spouse in front of our buddies?’ Most of the answer must be ‘NO’, right? If so, why we’ve got to spend our valuable time and money for something wasteful? Remember the Pareto Law that teaches us to focus on 20% of our effort to grab 80% of our result?
In my viewpoint, some of the 20% of the effort to reach the Customer Loyalty are:
- Respect our customers full-heartedly and attentively. Call by their name, not just ‘Sir’ or ‘Mister’ or ‘Miss’. Willing to explore our sensitivity to reveal their hidden needs;
- Involve our customers to experience something different. The experience may be in terms of romantic relationship life or social life activities (if you are a company that means CSR). Ask them to be a volunteer or a participant in our event such as Charity Night or Unveiling Ceremony;
- Involve them to solve the problem on site. The problem may occur because of natural disaster, one’s mistake and unsurpassed accident. The more they take part in the more they do care of us.
Now, we can come to a conclusion that a Loyalty of Customer is about willingness of our customer to collaborate with us. And that’s what I call a longitudinal relation. The relation, which results in a provision of our customer’s heart that they will never be able to live without our product / service! No substitution for it!
