The Incredible Value of Customer Loyalty

The path to customer loyalty begins with customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction is based on four predictable factors:

Customers are satisfied whenever they consistently receive:

• A perfect product
• Delivered by a caring, friendly person
• In a timely fashion

with (because any of those three elements may misfire)

• The support of an effective problem resolution process

"Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit," written by Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon, provides loyalty-building techniques pioneered by the world's most successful service leaders, including The Ritz-Carlton, Lexus, and Netflix.

"Few organizations realize how valuable customer loyalty is," the authors explain. "Many aspects of your business are out of your control, but the single most important process - creating loyal customers - obey predictable, stable rules that need to be mastered only once. Then the rules can be successfully applied over and over."

Regular readers of this blog know I am a huge proponent of guest services in the church; here's a post that sums it up. I'm looking forward to diving into this book and pulling out some of the key principles and sharing them with you.

How about it - are you ready to create loyal customers?

By the way, if you think a church doesn't have customers, I humbly suggest you're wrong.

And if you think a church doesn't need to use the vocabulary of customers, guest services, and the like, well, why don't you hang around and see?