November 2019

The Customer Loyalty Loop: Part 2

The Difference Between Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty

Your customers are your business. Without them, you would be making products with no one to buy them, hiring staff with no one to serve, or buying inventory to get dusty on the shelves. Hopefully you love what you do, but more hopefully you do it because you want to make customers happy. Happy customers become loyal customers, right? Well, sometimes they do.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is your customer's attitude (many times, emotional feelings) toward the product or service they bought from you. If you're thinking, ‘I provide great service, so all my customers must be satisfied!' then think again. Just providing good customer service isn't enough. If you have done the research to make sure you are providing the right message to the right person at the right time, then your customer satisfaction is likely to be high. In order to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, you must be strategic.

Right Person - You should know who your customer is. "Anyone could use my product!" is not good enough. Creating customer profiles helps you to know who exactly your ideal customer is and how to reach them (here's a handy Customer Profile Template³). Knowing the demographics of your customers such as age, gender, motivations, and locations, will allow you to find the right person for each of your products.

Right Time - Once you know who your customer is and what you want to say to them, you can start to discover how to reach them. This has been true since the beginning of advertising. Want to sell pantyhose in 1940? Put an ad in Woman's Day magazine. Procter & Gamble (P&G) perfected this with “their decision, long ago to produce radio and then TV programs to reach the audiences most likely to buy its products— hence, the term 'soap opera'.”⁴ Of course, this principle now applies to the digital world. Your marketing efforts online should be coordinated to reach your customers at just the right time on social media, your online store, or search, as well as traditional media.

Right Message - Representing yourself accurately in your marketing efforts is key to high customer satisfaction. There is no use in misrepresenting or overselling your product, because in the end, people's satisfaction is a factor of what they expected to get and what they got. If you build up your service to be more than it is, then the customer will be disappointed. When you know who are you trying to reach, talk to them in a way that is engaging and helpful. Your message should feel tailored to them, not mass-broadcasted to the world. So, Satisfaction = Reality – Expectations.

Customer Loyalty is your customer's ongoing behavior to continue purchasing from you. It is related to CSAT, but different. Typically, satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal, but just because they had a good experience once doesn't mean they are magically going to buy from you from now on. It's what happens after the sale that turns one-time customers into repeat customers. Loyalty is an ongoing customer experience decision - you must decide to actively engage your highly satisfied customers, even after they have completed their purchase. Following up with customers to let them know about additional products you offer, letting them be the first to know about new product launches, and listening to their feedback are good jumping off points to creating lasting customer loyalty.

3 Brown, Kristi. “How to Create a Customer Profile in 2019 [+ Template].” fitsmallbusiness.com, 2 January 2019.

4 David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik. “The Customer Decision Journey.” McKinsey Quarterly, 2009. pp. 1.

NEW Feature: Lead and Referral alerts

In the highly competitive world we live in, every second counts when trying to win business. Now, you can set LoyaltyLoop to alert you with an immediate email each time LoyaltyLoop generates a new Lead or Referral.

When you think about what LoyaltyLoop is doing, it's helping you build greater numbers of happy and loyal customers. Loyal customers generally want to do more business with you, but this only works if they know all the services you offer. And loyal customers love to talk you up to others who could use your services.

One of the great features of LoyaltyLoop Promoter plan is the capability to drive new business and revenue. This is done in your survey by presenting other products and services you offer, and by tactfully soliciting referrals. When customers choose other products or services, these are called “leads” in LoyaltyLoop. When your customer provides details of someone else who they think could benefit from working with you, these are called “referrals”. In doing so, LoyaltyLoop helps you identify business opportunities with your existing customers that you may be missing.

You can view your Leads and Referrals by clicking Opportunities from the left main menu, then clicking Referrals or Leads on the top tabs. In addition, the count of leads is displayed in your Weekly Summary Email as well as your New Response Alert which emails you any new feedback results for the prior 24 hours. Now, you can configure a new alert that fires immediately any time you receive a new lead or referral. These new alerts may just give you the extra edge to reply quickly to your customer to win that next deal.

To view and configure these new alerts, click your username in the right corner of LoyaltyLoop, then click Settings. On the settings page click Alerts & Notifications. If you have more than one location, click into that location and then click Alerts & Notifications. Click the edit icon next to the alert, add your email address, and save. Make sure the Active flip-switch for the alert is set to YES. Now, whenever a customer gives you a lead or a referral, you will be notified within minutes. Happy selling!

Get an instant email alert when you get a new leads!

Get an instant email alert when you get a new referral!

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