Guest Blogger Mark Klein: The Paths to Customer Loyalty
Different companies have followed different paths to reach the goal of high customer loyalty.
IBM was known for being safe, for product reliability. "No one was ever fired for buying IBM" went the popular saying. Their products were not exciting, but IBM made sure they always worked. Customers followed them in lockstep loyalty, a slavishness that Apple parodied in the famous "1984" commercial.
Microsoft became a very big company through persistence. Their goal was product functionality, and they have been known for trying over and over again until they got the product right. Sometimes they started from scratch (BASIC) and sometimes they acquired a starting point (MS-DOS), but they keep plugging away until they get the function right. Internet Explorer and Bing are more recent examples. Customers rewarded them by buying the upgrades to each new version of their many products.
Apple has achieved its top-of-the-market position by devoting itself to product form, emphasizing product design. The Mac OS, iPod, iPad, and iPhone are all manifestation of that product form mantra, though antenna-gate is a recent design stumble. Apple fanboys will buy anything Apple makes because of the beautiful design.
Google has followed the path of product value, innovating and then giving away free software to drive their search business. Google has reached its position of huge market share and customer trust by creating high value products, whether in search or productivity applications or mobile operating systems.
But there is another strategic path to great customer loyalty, a path where there is still an open slot in the starting gate. It is a path that has opened up through the explosion of available data, and it's a path many companies, big and small, can take to reach their own greatness. This path is to make the strategic decision to become a customer-centric company rather than a product-centric company like those others.
If your strategic decision is to go for customer centricity, then the tactics you use are customer service, customer segmentation, and customer analytics. You need to know everything you can about your customers, and use that knowledge in all of your communications with them. Customers are not all alike, and they are looking for value from their vendors, not an adversarial relationship. You earn their loyalty over time by putting them first, not your products.
Find your own path to greatness by becoming a customer-centric company. It's never been easier.
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About the Author: Mark Klein, PhD., is CEO of Loyalty Builders LLC
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