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?

Experience vs. Efficiency: The Winner is...

Starbucks wants to make sure you savor the experience offered in its stores, even if it means waiting a little longer.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Starbucks will soon roll out new guidelines for its baristas that may cause longer wait times for your favorite white chocolate mocha (okay, that's my favorite, but you get the idea).

Amid customer complaints that the Seattle-based coffee chain has reduced the fine art of coffee making to a mechanized process with all the romance of an assembly line, Starbucks baristas are being told to stop making multiple drinks at the same time and focus instead on no more than two drinks at a time—starting a second one while finishing the first.

Front line baristas are worried that the new guidelines will increase wait times, thus fueling the possibility of customer backlash - directed at the baristas. The corporate take is that the guidelines will eventually hasten the way drinks are made and lead to fresher, hotter drinks. Steaming milk for individual drinks, for example, "ensures the quality of the beverage in taste, temperature and appearance," the company documents state, while focusing on just two drinks at a time "reduces possibility for errors."

Lessons for ChurchWorld

• What is the value you place on the "experience" you are offering guests who come to your church every weekend?
• Are you tempted to shortcut the process and risk diluting that experience?
• Do you have systems in place that ensure (as much as possible) that your front-line "employees" focus delivering quality guest services vs. just "doing a job"?
• Do you have a mechanism in place which allows guests to respond to their experiences, allowing you to continually monitor and improve them?
• Do you continue review all systems to make sure "ends" and "means" are in their proper place?
• Do your values permeate throughout your organization, reflecting in both actions and words of your volunteers?

Starbucks is taking a risk, placing the value of "experience" over what seems to be efficiency.

Would your church be willing to do the same?

How to Build a Customer-Focused Company the Right Way

Customer service is the single most pressing problem for business managers and people in any service or sales operation. Many experts believe that you build a business from the customer up.

Ken Blanchard, bestselling author and inspirational speaker, has written or co-authored many great books dealing with this topic. In “Customer Mania!” Blanchard and co-authors Jim Ballard and Fred Finch write of the key to customer service: creating a people-oriented, performance-drive, customer-first organization. Drawing on a real-life study of the world’s largest restaurant company, Yum! – owner of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Long John Silvers, and A&W – the authors explain how any organization can develop a unified, people-first, customer-oriented culture. Customer Mania! emphasizes four critical steps:

• Step One: Set Your Sights on the Right Target-the bottom line grows from taking care of customers and creating a motivating environment for your team.
• Step Two: Treat Your Customers the Right Way-determine the kind of experience you want your customers to have as they interact with every part of the company.
• Step Three: Treat Your People the Right Way-use strategies ranging from smart hiring to training and development to managing performance and creating a recognition culture.
• Step Four: Have the Right Kind of Leadership-you can’t do it all yourself, so let your team put their own brains to work and then support them all the way.
  

In developing each of these concepts, Blanchard introduces his “dream” of how they should work. That is followed by Yum!’s reality and a scorecard of how they are doing.

Yum! Turned out to be an excellent choice; the book chronicles their journey from being a lackluster division of PepsiCo to a standout independent company. Along the way, they moved from giving lip service to focusing on the customer to diving head-long into creating a “customer mania culture” throughout the organization. And it worked.

Yum! Doesn’t merely have a purpose; it has a passion. Can you say the same about your church or organization?

Questions for ChurchWorld
What is your target?
Who is your “customer”?
Who is on your team?
Who are your leaders?

What Are People Saying To Each Other - About You?

The title of the book by Pete Blackshaw captured my attention and I wondered: Is this true for churches as well?

Blackshaw's work documents how the balance of power for today's businesses has shifted - the consumer is now in control. In the world of Consumer Generated Media (blogs, YouTube, social networking, etc.) a single disgruntled customer can broadcast his opinion to millions and derail a company or undermine a global brand. Companies can't ignore CGM, and have nowhere to hide. According to Blackshaw, the only response is creating 100 percent credibility by establishing:

• Trust


• Authenticity


• Transparency


• Active Listening


• Responsiveness


• Positive Affirmation

I know this is a business book, but the more I get into it, the more I find application for churches. Here are a few questions I have:

• Are churches impacted by consumer-to-consumer communication?


• Do churches have reason to be concerned about what people are "saying" about them?


• How can churches find out if CGM is going on?


• How can churches make positive use of CGM?

What do you think? What can you add to the conversation?

Beyond Customer Service

Do you give up, clean up, or follow up?

The following comments were originally adapted from Zig Ziglar on Selling and Jeffrey Gitomer's The Sales Bible for a business development audience. In terms of what churches need to do to think about the "customer" they are trying to reach, I think they are very appropriate for church leaders to consider. Remember, guests to your church are measuring the experience they receive from you not to other churches, but to other customer-oriented businesses.

The days of “customer service” as the standard of excellence are long gone. Today, everybody talks about the importance of “customer satisfaction.” In this competitive market the only way to get ahead (and sometimes the only way to survive) is to go beyond customer service to customer satisfaction.

The best way to prevent a prospect or client from becoming unhappy is to provide excellent service before the problems are allowed to arise. The Norwegian word for sell is selje, which literally means “to serve.” Isn’t that a great sales strategy?

Here are some ways you can “serve” your prospect or client:

• Satisfactory customer service is no longer acceptable
• Customer service begins at 100%
• The customer’s perception is reality
• A mistake is a chance to improve the company
• Problems can create beneficial rearrangements
• Make the customer feel important
• Learn how to ask questions
• The most important art – the art of listening
  

Customer satisfaction in the never-ending pursuit of excellence to keep clients so satisfied that they tell others of the way they were treated by your company.

Is your church raising the bar on "customer satisfaction"? Or is it just the same old, same old?