How to Build Great Customer Loyalty Programs

How much is customer loyalty worth to your business? _Can loyalty be engineered? The answers? You’ll find them in the data.

Most of us have been there. You’re making a purchase and things don’t go quite right. You are frustrated and want to give feedback, but you don’t have a clear idea of how to do that. So you tell a few friends, you post it on Facebook and you may visit the company’s website to try to fill in a form.

In that moment, you simply aren’t feeling the love. So much so that you may never purchase from that retailer again. Next time you’ll be on the lookout for an alternative, even if it is more expensive because you didn’t feel valued at all.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As an organization, how many of your customers are going away feeling like they aren’t heard? Or like you don’t value their purchase?

If you don’t know the answer to this question, you cannot afford to guess. The answer is probably too many. In a global, hyper-competitive economy, you cannot leave your customer love and loyalty to guesswork. You need to be more than vaguely in the know. You need data. And you need to be able to manage it in and use it, in ways that deliberately build and support customer loyalty.

Turning Your Dissatisfied Customers into Raving Fans

In that same scenario, what would have happened if that customer was able to provide feedback about their experience in real-time? With that feedback, your team would then be able to identify the problem and follow-up with them within a matter of hours.

Suddenly, that dissatisfied customer would feel like a total rock star because she was heard and you told her she matters. She wouldn’t be able to help but tell her friends because unlike all the other retailers out there, you went out of your way to make it right. Her friends would buy from you next time because they remember how responsive your customer service is.

That is the power of real-time customer experience feedback. Your company’s customer satisfaction, repeat customers and brand loyalty hang in the balance. And if you are a large company, getting it right means 100s of millions of dollars, which is why you can’t leave customer feedback to outdated methods where you rely on customers to tell you what’s wrong. You need to ask for their insight when they are engaged with your brand.

Real-Time Feedback = Real Results

To better understand customer attitudes and behaviors, feedback is best collected in real-time. As humans, our memories are imperfect and open to influence from outside factors, which means if there’s a lag between when we experience something and when we are asked about it, the results may not be entirely accurate.

Which is where QuestBack “mobile first” surveys come in. They operate at every significant touchpoint, on any device, on any channel. In real-time you get customer event-driven data so that things can be addressed as they are happening, and you have analytic software to influence and inform business decision-making.

A great example of real-time feedback in action is, SWISS, an airline that implemented real-time feedback using QuestBack and created an online survey to capture more relevant customer and flight details. This enabled them to respond instantly to customer issues. Now they can actively address issues before they escalate.

Customer feedback management is helping thousands of our clients earn more love and loyalty. How about you? Have you used feedback to build loyalty? What are your thoughts on turning regular customers into raving fans with feedback?

Meet us over on LinkedIn of Twitter to comment on this post. We’d love to hear from you!

Read more about Customer Satisfaction Surveys.