Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Let me let your readers in on a little secret about
loyalty. People don't buy brands, they belong to
them. To protect against the loss of a customer or
client when a rep defects to the competition,
companies should spend much more time doing things
that make clients want to belong to their brand.

Delivering the ultimate customer service must be a mind set of every individual within an organization. With out doing so an organization stands a greater chance at loosing a valuable customer whether it be the clients follows a trusting associate making a career change or leave due to lack of commitment from the organization as a whole.

We have to understand that building a brand is about creating name recognition. If your product or service provides evidence of quality and your entire organization places emphases on delivering the ultimate customer experience it will essentially be irrelevant as to whether or not an associate moves on to greener pastures.

The key to customer loyalty which transcends individual relationships is to give the customer visibility into the whole organization. If the only point of contact is one person and all that customer or client sees is what that person does for them, then it is understandable that their loyalty will fall in that narrow sphere. However, if the organization behind the person is given visibility: a letter from the CEO, a courtesy call from customer service to make sure everything is satisfactory, a note from accounts when an invoice is paid thanking them for their business, etc, then the customer is more likely to hold their loyalty with the company not the person.

There isn't much of a conflict between loyalty to a brand product and loyalty to an employee that services it. Normally, it adds up. If it's a non-brand product like a hairdo in a generic hair salon, yes, clients primarily relate to their hairstylist, not the salon. If she moves on, they would rather follow. But it wouldn't be that obvious if it were a brand salon, say L'Oreal. People stick first to a brand, service comes as a complement.

You are touching an uncovered live power wire; and I personally do the same regardless of the size of the organization I was dealing with or the market share it does have. Every business owner knows this problem by heart and will not debate much to defend his customer loyalty due to many reasons. One of the most important reasons is that the salesman when making the deal, he/she handle differently and go beyond buy/sell issue; as a matter of fact he/she turn it to human-to-human value gaining during the entire process. It is more like heart-to-heart talk between the salesman and the buyer.

If we look closely to one of the famous loyalty programs - hotel-free-night or the frequent-flyer – we find it as a great loyalty programs but very few hotels and airlines that managed to really turned to a successful tool. The reason is that the program requires the client to more 10s of nights or 1000s of miles before he can get a free nigh or a ticket to a destination he never desire let alone he can not sell the ticket. The client wants to feel appreciation from the company if he makes more than one-two deals.

Nonetheless, these programs yet did not help to keep the customer and still the salesperson has to power to shift the client to another company. Several strategies have been invented to overcome this problem such:
1- Partner with indirect channels – where the partner takes the responsibilities to interface with the clients and the problem here to keep the partner loyalty
2- Shuffle the account manager - Dangerous because the clients has a bond with his account manager
3- Top management should communicate from time to time with the clients – Good techniques because it helps in giving an impact that the entire company from the top to the bottom is serving
4- Sell on-line – it is a good approach to reduce human interaction and lack the human touch
5- Customer forums – Very effective and help listening to clients’ feed back, having eye contact and introduce new faces
6- Introduce customer testimonies to the public and press- makes client attached to their words and defend the brand but not good with low value products
7- Give goodies and giveaways – cost issue and must be carefully selected
8- Effective helpdesk and customer service – back to human touch

These are all just techniques to minimize the impact when a good salesman leaves the organization.

If relationships are all about people, and companies want to build strong relationships, what are they doing about it?

Do you know of any companies that operationalize (or have guidelines for) the relationship? Can it be taught? Are companies thinking about that level of relationship-building?

Having been at other companies and left for greener pastures I would say that 80% of my clients ultimately follow me. I'm suprised however that this doesn't happen instantaneously, but perhaps that's my ego. My former company's only "tact" is to drastically reduce prices in which no one wins but the client. But that's all they have to beat me.

I completely agree with William Russell, as I had been personally advocating the similar thoughts to my team while being the Head of a Retail banking branch.We need to find a balancing act between People & process as both supplement and complement each other. We as human beings cannot do away with the warmth because that's what we experience from our mothers as our first ever life experience in this world. Hence, people play an important role on both sides of the transaction i.e those who r buying & those who r selling. As a corporate we need to provide that balancing act so that our customers get the same warmth from other relationship managers and at the same time should have been introduced to the other channels and not just the people channel.While doing so it's important that our processes are robust and in tune towards customer's expectations. It's important that our people should also understand the processes and keep giving the feedback to make it more convenient for the customers to experience and trust.
ashish.sharma@axisbank.com

Corporations can't have relationships with people or other corporations. People have relationships.

So ... if you want your company to have a relationship with a customer, it has to be based on relationships with multiple employees. If a sole employee is the only one with a relationship, is it a surprise that the relationship with the company would evaporate when the employee leaves?

Look at the great relationships you have with companies you buy from. Can't you trace it to relationships with individual people within those companies?

Like the other posts and the article suggest, you need to search for a manner in which the company brand and value is communicated to the client. Striking the right balance is always the tough part as you want to be heard, but not detract away from the personal connection the Account Manager has made.

Take the general insurance industry. For the larger commercial client, in their eyes the Account Manager is key, but often it is the structure, processes and capabilities that the company has put in place that enabled customer satisfaction. The client needs to be aware that the Account Manager may not be able to deliver similar solutions in his new world.

Companies have a better chance of keeping there customers when salespeople move on if the company has had contact with there accounts on a regular basis. A salesperson may call on a customer once every week, month or year. If you have an ongoing system to talk or follow up with a customer on a regular basis the customer will have the relationship with the business as well as the salesperson.

In our case telesales works great, as well as having someone call to check on the deliveries that are made.

That's a tough one and it actually does depend on the business. It's doubtful that preventing customers of a hairstylist from following them elsewhere is even possible since that person is essentially THE brand experience. However, even though people are without question key to building satisfaction and loyalty, there has to be a company tie-in to every customer interaction - be it from a team, corporate department, etc. In larger settings, the relationship may only exist with the account manager. For the company, that means your account manager has to integrate their customers into relevant aspects of the business rather than just being the only face of the business. Instead, account managers should be a gateway to other departments, contacts, divisions, etc as it makes sense for their business. When a customer has exposure to multiple facets of the business, the likelihood of losing them when your account manager moves on is low. Otherwise, you risk it all by giving an account manager or customer service specialist complete control over company interface issues for your customers. If that's all a customer knows, guess what's going to happen?