Parlez-vous Loyalty?

Aftermarketing^sm is a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of establishing valued relationships with customers, but it goes beyond simply satisfying a customer. Aftermarketing challenges a business to go out of its way to acknowledge customers and show them appreciation for their patronage. It's a whole new way of thinking about what generates profits and how you should be doing business. Aftermarketing emphasizes the value of establishing ongoing dialogues with customers. It's accomplished by seven tactics, some of which you may already be intuitively practicing:

1. Maintain a file of your customers--and acknowledge them and tell them you appreciate their business. A list of all current, inactive, and past clients is an essential business tool. This customerbase is the core of any Aftermarketing program, allowing a business to track its success with customers and thereby to identify its high-value customers. Rather than quarterly net profits, the customer base is really the best indicator of the health of any business. Leveraging the information in the customerbase is a potent competitive tool. Just formally thanking a customer for his or her purchases can make a difference. A major retailer randomly selected two groups of customers and sent personal thank-yous to one half of the group and nothing to the other. In tracking the results, the retailer discovered those customers who had been acknowledged spent 14% more at the store in the following ninety days than the unacknowledged customers!
2. Blueprint your customer contacts. Use a schematic procedure to map how customers interact with your organization. By doing so, you'll better understand your customers' experience. Each interaction is literally a moment of truth. With each interaction clearly identified, you'll know: employees who participate; your customers' needs and expectations at that instant; how well you've recruited, trained, and enabled your employees to meet those needs and expectations; and what indicators you may use to judge the success of the interaction. Schematic blueprints can be used to help better manage and thereby improve your customers' experiences.
3. Regularly conduct customer satisfaction surveys. The most recent vogue in automobile marketing, customer satisfaction surveys are important to all businesses, and to Aftermarketing, in four ways: (1) they provide a periodic measurement of the satisfaction of the customer base and illuminate performance issues which require improvement; (2) they monitor the performance of individual operational units that are often far from headquarters; (3) they spot-check what is happening in those thousands or millions of transactions which occur somewhat invisibly each day; and (4) they routinely tell customers the business cares about them.
4. Analyze what customers tell you. Every business faces two extremes with its customers: maximizing delight and minimizing pain. Before a business strives to delight its customers, it should first eliminate as many points of pain for customers as possible. It is impractical for most businesses to invite all of their customers to participate in a satisfaction survey. To be receptive to hearing about customers' negative experiences, all customers should be encouraged to contact the business if they have a question, a problem, or if they feel that have been treated inappropriately. The business manager's obligation is to review what customers say in their letters and phone calls. No matter how painful it may feel, you are better off knowing about a customer complaint and having a chance to correct it than having an unhappy customer quietly walk away deciding never to buy from you again (which research indicates is what occurs over 90% of the time). Unfortunately, few companies have formal review programs for dealing with customer-initiated correspondence.
5. Invest in customer communication programs. A good way to highlight the relevancy of a product or service for customers (and to manage evidence at the same time) is to create some form of proprietary communication channel with customers. This can be a magazine or newsletter, but could also be privileged access to a special Internet site. It is important that the communication be customized to individual customer's needs and interests, not a corporate `puff piece.' This sort of formal, personalized communication can help bond a customer to a business even more.
6. Host special customer events or programs. Customers appreciate events that make them feel special, celebrating their customership with a business. For some businesses whose products or services offer special cachet, the ability to associate with the organization may be profound. But even for those businesses whose products may be a bit more mundane, treating a customer with a special program is just as valuable. The type of special programs that have proven most popular range from giving the best customers special privileges (such as early boarding for an aircraft or express service lines) to special events that gather customers together (like Jeep's Jamborees), reinforcing all customers' dedication to the brand.
7. Identify and reclaim lost customers . Lost customers represent the defects of a business's customer outreach. As such, lost customers are often set aside and quickly forgotten. Organizations aren't fond of being reminded of their failures, but the reality of the situation is that lost customers represent one of the best sources for `new' business. Lost customers know the business and the quality of the business's products and services. Furthermore, the business has important knowledge of them (in the customerbase). We have found that over half of all lost customers will speak about their defection, almost a third will generally proffer what the business could have done to retain them, and up to 20% will return if the problem is resolved.

These seven activities to help businesses build stronger bonds with their current valued customers are far from revolutionary. Many intuitive businesses, like Madam Meissonnier's restaurant, get it instinctively. If you suggested any of these actions as novel solutions, they would laughingly dismiss your suggestion as completely obvious. But big business today, with its extended channels of distribution, has distanced itself from its end users. With distance has come a loss of respect: a failure to recognize how customer loyalties are established. It is time again for an old, basic idea to be reapplied to the conduct of the global businesses of today!