Good morning everybody and welcome to our third webinar. This is Tom Ulbirch
with the University of Buffalo Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. And this
morning we're glad to have you here with us. We're going to talk to you for about
25-30 minutes about the customer loyalty advantage. And real quick before we start
as usual I want to thank our sponsors of Bonadio Group and Uniland for
their sponsorship that allows us to bring you stuff like these webinars. And
also we want to remind everybody that CEL is celebrating our 30th birthday
this year. 30 years 1,400 grads $ 2.2 billion of economic
impact in the community representing over 22,000 employees out in the
workforce here in Western New York. So again thank you for joining us. And one
of the things I want you to think about this morning I want you to take away
from here is why is the customer experience important. And I want you to
think about that the whole way through today. And to think about your
loyal customers and what are you doing to engage them, to take care of them and
to make sure that they're having a great experience with your
company. So we're gonna talk a lot about the customer experience this morning. So
the first thing I'd ask you is - why is customer loyalty important? Why should we
even care? And I want to start by saying that perhaps we should care if we think
about this question how difficult is it to get a new customer. And the answer to
that I think we all know is it's pretty bad news for you. It's not gonna get any
easier any time soon to get new customers. And part of the issue around
this is just being able to get through the world today that is just inundated
with information and complexity, and our customers are being inundated with
information in a constantly increasing pace. And let me give you a few examples
with that. You know imagine your customers today living in a world where
all the information you know is literally out of-date in
two or three years from today. So if you look at the simple cell phone or the
most of you have an iPhone, some type of smartphone probably, all the things that
this device in our pocket does today would have required, we have photos, we
have a calendar, we have a phone, we have access to the internet, we can get our email, we
have a clock. You can look at all the the icons on on the front screen there, all
of those would have been separate tools. A camera you would have these would all
been separate tools. All right now in our pocket we have access to everything. And
many times we forget about how complex a lot of this is. And because of this
complexity made simple through devices like this, we're able to do a lot more
and have a lot more information coming at us. So a couple other a little bit of
background for you just to show you how quickly things are changing and the
world that we live in is different. The average person is going to have 10
jobs by age 40, and 12 to 15 in a lifetime. This is from data from a late
2015 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Really interesting, where there was a
world 25 30 years ago where you went to work for an employer and likely stayed
there for much of your career. Another interesting stat I think that shows you
how quickly things are changing are this stat around the top job. So the top jobs
in 2016 didn't even exist 10 years ago. So the jobs that are here today were
not even there. This means that students that are studying for a four-year
degrees say at our university in a technical field that much almost half
the information that they're being exposed to will be outdated by the time
they start their third year of school. And if you just look at social media and
look at some of the stats here about monthly use, really incredible. So
there's over 100 billion searches monthly on Google. 1.79
billion monthly interaction people interacting on Facebook. 300 million
people interacting on Skype. 370 million tweets.
Just a crazy amount of information that people are exposed to. And then of course
if you look just at publishing. Another example of how much information is
coming at you on a daily basis. The number of books being published in the
US is literally exploded and not only the US all across the world. But there
were over 1 million different book titles published in 2009 that stat
goes back quite away but more than triple the amount of books that were
published four years before that. So just incredible amount of information. And
Walker-Smith which measures advertising says that we've gone from being exposed
to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970s as many as 5,000 ads today in one single
day. It seems like the goal of most  marketers and advertisers is to cover
every blank space with some kind of brand logo or a promotion or an
advertisement is what Walker Smith says. You can see that just in you know this
simple picture from Times Square. So your customers are literally drowning in
information. And kind of a final stat here for you it's estimated that a
week's worth of news in the New York Times today contains more information an
individual would have come across in a lifetime in 18th century. So this is the
world that you're living in today, that your customers are living in and you
are trying to communicate with them. So it's increasingly expensive difficult to
get your marketing message through this clutter to attract new customers. Yet
that is how many of us and I'm going to say most of us are spending the majority
of our time, our money and our energy, all the while we're trying to get new
customers but all this time we're ignoring our loyal customers and
really rarely considering the experience in our world that our loyal customers
are having with us. We're screaming at people to say "listen to me" in an effort
to get new customers but doing very little for existing customers. And I
would ask you why is that? Why do we ignore our loyal customers? And I think
the answer for most of us would be that they're there. They're coming
back they're there and because they're there we don't worry about them so much.
And what I want you to take away from today is we need to worry about our
existing customers. And one of the best ways to build our business is on is
engaging our loyal customers and spending some more time with them. So if
I told you that there is a better way to sell more, to be more profitable and to
spend less money on marketing and advertising, would you be interested? And
hopefully you're sitting there saying "yeah if there's a better way I would be
interested." And I want to say to you today that there is a better way and
this picture reminds me of loyalty. So there's a better way focusing on loyal
customers. Who are loyal customers and what can we do to focus on them? Why
should we even bother? Because research shows that loyal customers repurchase
more, buy additional product lines or services from us, are the best source of
referrals, and the fourth point here I think is the most important point -
these are the customers that will actually provide us constructive
feedback. So they are the customers that will give us good constructive feedback
which we often seek out and need to make our companies better but we'll often find it
hard to get good feedback. So loyal customers drive profitable growth and I
love this cartoon by Ted Goff that which makes it really visually
clear. So here on the left are our finding new customer procedures. All the
procedures to get a new customer. On the right to simplicity of keeping old
customers or the procedure involved in that and the simplicity with it. So why
bother with loyal customers? Because loyal customers are promoters of our
products and our services. They're promoters of your company and they're
literally shouting at the top their lungs to say "go engage with
this company." So what we're really looking for is to say how do we
make our customers or how do we create an experience that engage our customers
in such a way that they become promoters? So I want to look a little bit about why
do some customers become promote of our company, our products and our
services that we have to offer. And the reason really is two fold. We can we make
buying decisions even today although everybody thinks every decision is made on
price. It's not. We make buying decisions with our head where we make these
decisions that say does the value proposition exceed my expectations,
is a value good for the product features offered for the quality for the price. So
no question we're always making decisions this way. But what many of us
forget about is we also buy with our heart.
Yes even today we buy with our heart. Where are you and heart purchase is
where you're purchasing from somebody that it's not just about quality and
price that's sort of the entrance to the game. But people are adding more. A heart
event would be we're delighting customers in a personal or emotional way.
Perhaps you know them by name, you show them appreciation, you listen to them, you
share their values. This is the heart purchase. So if we're able to do that
we can drive loyal relationships which then in turn will drive profitable
growth. So we have to make sure that customers get treated in a way that they
want to come back but they don't only want to come back, they want to bring
their friends with them. So how do we do that? And really how we do it is we're
looking at this ultimate test to say will people co-brand
with their personal reputation with your company? So here's an example of
co-branding where Taco Bell and Doritos came together for co-brand. But people
walking around each of our customers has a personal brand and we can't forget
that. That brand is something that they carry around with them, it's who they
represent. When people take their brand and are willing to co-brand with our
brand it makes their recommendations all that much more valuable to potentially
to people that may engage with our business. So if you look at
these businesses that we'll call loyalty leaders or customers
that really promote you. So what are the companies that really lead in
loyalty? They grow at a faster pace than their competition. There's some research
that shows that they grow at over 2.5 times the pace of their competitors. And
they're growing because they earn the loyalty of their customers and in a way
you might think about it's the only way to grow your base of repeat customers is
through customer loyalty. And then loyal customers again become promoters. And
we'll talk about that a little bit here as we go into some examples of loyal
customers. So a lot of this comes out of there's many companies that look at the
customer experience and customer loyalty but let me give you some data from
Satmetirx who has a registered trademark for a Net Promoter Score which
is a way that we measure customer loyalty. And some of the data I'm going
to share with you now is from their 2017 US Consumer Net Promoter scores. And I
want to I want to share with you some of the best in the industry and see if you
recognize them. So one is USAA which continues its eight-year run at the top
of the benchmark it holds the top rating in three different industry sectors as
having the most or the highest Net Promoter Score, the most loyal customers.
That's in the auto insurance and the banking industry and the home and
contents insurance industry. Another company many of you will recognize this
company Costco consistently sits atop a lot of the rankings and is usually right
up there on the top of all the rankings. Theyve recently regained the lead from
Nordstrom and a great example from Costco here is if you look at some data
and compare Costco to I guess one of their main competitors would probably be
Sam's Club. If you look at what Costco pays, the number of employees, they
have, the turnover percent, the sales per square foot, they're paying or their
employees quite a bit more on average. Their turnover employees is very very
low it's only 12% compared to the mid-30s for Sam's Club. And the
astonishing stat here from Casco is their sales per
square foot are nearly $1000 per square foot
whereas Sam's Clubs looks to be about only half of that. So again this company
is really focused on loyalty. Another company that is known for their customer
service and loyal customers is Nordstrom's. Very well known for their
customer service experience. And the airline industries, a couple
companies here I want to mention. So Virgin America this year this past year
in 2017 edged out JetBlue who was the leader in the airline category and
Southwest Air who has always been at historically near the top among major
airlines. So you've got Virgin America's sitting on top, you've got JetBlue and
you've got perennial you've got Southwest Air that is always right up
there. And I think I just recently flew Southwest air and those of you they do
fly Southwest I could use that maybe as a good example of the customer
experience. Usually they have a great customer experience. The process of
getting onboard some people love it, some people don't like it but always
experience with how they interact with their customers seems to be a great
experience. And again that's reflected in the amount of loyal customers that they
have. Another one that you will certainly recognize that sits consistently at the
top of their list in their industry is Apple who is usually right up there with
Samsung. In the restaurant business Chick-Fil-A has incredibly high Net
Promoter scores and this is the only company that I'm aware of in the
restaurant industry that has made the best place to work for list. And then
when you get into other industries another interesting one that's that sits
the top here is Netflix in the online entertainment industry. Very loyal
customers love the experience. So let me leave you with one other company and
that is Four Seasons. So Four Seasons was actually founded in Toronto
Canada but when you look at the experience that they create it's just
unbelievable some of the things that that they do to be at the top of this
list consistently. And they really focus on their team giving their
customers what they call genuine respect. They can solve problems for their
customers quickly but they respect them at a very very high level in it and it
shows in their loyalty. And Enterprise Rent-a-Car many people familiar with
always until recently had been located off-site, never really in a
convenient location but they thrilled their customers every single time. I give
you a quick experience of using Enterprise Rent-a-Car maybe eight-ten
years ago. Many companies have copied this but I remember going to Florida,
getting picked up having a great experience getting my car and it was hot
out then be given three or four bottles of cold water for the passengers in the
car which was you know incredible customer experience that a lot of people
are starting to emulate in that industry too. But it's a little things that matter
and we'll talk about that. And perhaps one of the companies that has a
really high brand recognition and often it is up there with their Net Promoter
Score is Harley Davidson. And this is one of the only companies that I can say
that I'm aware of that their company that their customers are so loyal that
they're literally co-branding in a deep way. Literally branding their bodies with
the with the Harley-Davidson brand and tattoos. I could also talk about loyalty
laggards. We could talk about a bunch of companies that are that are falling
behind in their industry and talk about why that is. For the sake of time
I'm not gonna put a lot of lot of them up there but I am gonna put up and this
is not to pick on one company but I'm gonna put up United. And just let you
reflect on how quickly a bad customer service experience whether directly
their fault or not how that reflection of a bad customer service experience can
negatively impact a brand. And and I'm sure United is a
great company and working really really hard to be a great company but you see
some of the negativity that can come when the loyalty experience is disrupted
for people. So we're really looking at customer loyalty is building trust and
confidence with your customers. So I'm gonna remind you again profitable growth
and a loyalty to customers and your employees is really the same thing. So
now let's talk about how can we really get to this this level of a customer
loyalty experience. How do you do it? And it's really quite simple although that
not that simple maybe to engage in on a daily basis but it's it's really all
about the Golden Rule. And the Golden Rule is simply as you remember do unto
others is you would have them do unto you. But it also means that you as a
company have to have a message from the top to your customers that says to them
every single day that customers are our first priority. Your feedback is driving
our focus, we've taken the following actions based on your input please
continue to provide that feedback. We depend on it
and you need to communicate this constantly to your customers via
newsletters, advertising, blogs, customer advisory groups, etc. Another great
example of this is I was listening the other morning to one of Tim
Faris's podcasts and he had on there the past CEO of Home Depot. He would start
every weekend or every day he would spend the first hour of his day reading
customer Emails to get feedback and understand what the pulse of the
customer was out on the floor. All the way to their corporate headquarters were
not called corporate headquarters, they were called support for the store. So it
would support forget exactly the terminology they use but they weren't
focused on being on top they were focused on how can headquarters support
the stores where our customers are. It also has to be a message from the top to
your team. Where you the leader of your company is saying costumers
our first priority. Their feedback drives our focus. We have taken the following
actions based on our customers input. Employee recognition is based on the
results that our customers are expressing and employee compensation in
the best of these examples is tied to the results of loyalty. And again we have
to constantly communicate this to our customers. So one other thing I want to
point out it's really really critical that we never ever ever ever ever ever
ever ever take bad profits. We've got to play the long game when it comes to
customer service. So bad profits let me give you a few examples but bad profits
cause our customers to react and look like this. It actually will turn them
from what could have been a promoter into detractor and a detractor is not a
customer that you want out there. So they're using their brand to work
against your company and people have powerful brands. And you don't want them
to be working against you. So what are some examples of bad profits. I like to
use for those of you that might be old enough to remember this when there were
telephones in a hotel and you would often before cellphones use the phone in
hotel, when your phone bill could be larger than your room bill those are bad
profits. Banking return check fees $45-50 a check fee. I'm gonna call that a bad
profit. It does that cost them $45 or $50 to fix that Airlines $100-200
surcharges on exchanging tickets. You're gonna notice Southwest Air doesn't do
that. Airlines baggage fees so somebody said to me another day when I always
brag about Southwest Air. They were always known for low fares and so they
said well they're not low fares anymore. What we have to remember when we're
looking at Southwest prices though they're fully loaded when you're looking
at everybody else's price they all of a sudden as you go to checkout, you have to
add on for bags, you have to add on for this, you have to add on for that. So
again those are bad bad types of profits. And there's others that you can probably
think of and I'm going to share one at the end of this with you that I just
recently experienced. So the question is how do we
know then if we're doing a good job with this customer engagement or customer
loyalty experience? We really didn't have  good tools for this because in the
boardroom we're really focused on trailing numbers, we're looking at profit,
we're looking at data like that but we really doesn't have any data for loyalty.
We always manage from financials and driver decisions from there but we
weren't tying compensation to loyalty, our tools are for managing for profit
not for loyalty. And the most people would do is perhaps a satisfaction
survey but I want to challenge you with that for a minute and say do
satisfaction surveys as we know them really really work. And  I want you
to think about it you're experienced with customer satisfaction surveys. Most
satisfaction surveys really communicate the wrong message. Many of them are long
which makes them unbearable. Did you ever start a survey online and by the time
you click to the third page and you don't know when it's gonna end you bail
out on the survey? Many of them are poorly set up. Did you ever get a survey
from somebody and the first couple things that asks for is your name? Well
it almost reminds me of how much you really don't care about me as a customer
when you just sent me this you're asking me to fill in my name. And here's the
interesting part about satisfaction surveys - many people still become
detractors or defects from your company even though they mark satisfied on a
survey. So 80% of people that defect from a company or leave purchasing a
product or service from a company have still marked satisfied on a survey. And
the reason is satisfied and loyal or two different things.
You may be satisfied at the meal that you got for $100 but it might not have
been a loyalty experience, it might not been over the top. You might be seeing
with your head okay that's a fair value for what I paid $100 was a fair value
but I'm not that excited to come back because it was a good value but there
was nothing all that exciting that makes you want to come back to quote-unquote
this restaurant. But the thing is we still like surveys. And again a little
quote here from Andy Taylor to remind you the only
to grow businesses to get customers come back for more and to tell their friends.
And what I'm going to show you now Net Promoter Score actually was launched
within Enterprise Rent-a-Car. So really what we want to find out what we want to
measure loyalty and really how we measure loyalty is is to ask a question
that says would you recommend us to a friend. This question or question like
that is actually probes both dimensions of loyalty that I talked about before.
It probes the head dimension -  best features, best service, best price,
value - but it also probes the heart dimension because we're saying would you
recommend we're not saying satisfied with the heart dimension. Do they know me?
Do they value me? Do they listen to me? Do they share my values? So there is a tool
Fred Reichel came up with this tool. Setmetrix is a company that is very
engaged with it. It's called Net Promoter Score and I'll
introduce it to you here quickly we don't have time to really get into it
but I'll give you some resources at the end that you may find helpful.
It really does this - we ask a question like this it says how likely is it that
you would recommend this firm or product or service to a friend on a scale of 0
to 10? So 0 not likely at all 9 and 10 extra 10 extremely likely. So what do we
do with this information when we get it back? So nines and tens are promoters, we
know that they're going to be promoting our product. Seven and eights we consider
passive and zero through sixes are detractors. So as we gather this
information and get it back what do we do with the information? Nines and tens
being promoters who want to ask for those referrals in fact we probably
don't even have to ask for referrals but we want to make sure we don't ignore
those costumers and we take extra good care of them. They're loyal, they stay
longer, they did buy more, they attract new customers. Sevens and the eights are
passives what can we do to give them a loyalty experience consistently and move
them to a nine or ten. But what I really want you to pay about are the zero to
six the detractors. Detractors can do a lot of harm to your business on they
certainly hurt it and what I would recommend is
zero to six is that we take the time to pick up the phone and talk to them and
understand why they're detractor for our company. And if any of you had this
experience of being called by somebody when you've complained or put in a
complaint, many many times it's a fact that you've picked up the phone and
tried to solve the problem, you can turn a detractor into a neutral or many times
a promoter. Because most of the world does not take the time to take care of
their customers this way. So when do you ask about this when do you ask this
question? There's two times you can ask
it you can ask it at the time of a
transaction. So if you have larger ticket items like perhaps you sell cars
you might ask it at the time of transaction. And the other way you can do
it is you can ask it what I call pulse of the company. So you could ask you all
of your customers if you have a database or a segment of your customers you can
ask them every six months, every four months whatever you feel is is a good
setup to do this. And there's a lot that goes into this so I don't want you to
think it's oversimplified. Again I'm gonna give you some resources if you're
interested and learning more and implementing it.
But let's not oversimplify it because you can do a lot of damage if you do. But
I want to warn you too. If you ask this is my biggest warning to you if you're
gonna do this and you're gonna ask you have to close the loop or you risk
alienating customers. So if anytime you have given people feedback and they've
not responded to your feedback, this is a really good way to alienate customers
and we want to make sure that we're not doing that. So you have to have a system
in place in order to understand what you're gonna do with the data when you
get it back and how you're gonna close the loop with customers. The other thing
just to give you really kind of top-level warnings is you've got to make
sure that you have good data. This picture is kind of putting things a
little over the top for you it's not this complicated but you've got to make
sure that you've got data where you can sample your customer segments, where you
can balance a reputation properly so that representation of the
scores matches your customer segments and is weighted appropriatly.
And you want to make sure their voices are heard according to the value of the
customer. So think about the 80/20 rule or maybe 20% of your customers are 80%
of your business. You want to make sure you get feedback that you're looking at
these segments and not making a bad decision because what if the 80% that is
just a small part of your business but they're 80% by volume what if
they're really really happy about something
but the 20% are sending you a message that you're ignoring because you're
paying 80%. You can do a lot of damage to your company so you've got a sample the
decision makers and influencers in a really good way. So again remind you
you've got to give voice to these samples and those with the most recent
purchases and those with the most frequent purchases should be given a
bigger voice. So recency and frequency is important and it counts. You also have to
look at you have outlier customers with higher average tickets that might skew
your results. And are you sampling all relationships that impact the buying
decision. Another thing to just kind of give you a little warning as you're
looking in Net Promoter Score is context matters. You've got to look at
your Net Promoter Score against your own benchmarks in Net Promoter Score and it
varies a lot by industry. So it often correlates to brand. Mass-market brands
will have lower scores. Niche brands will typically have higher scores. Businesses
that have low involvement with customers will have lower scores. Businesses that
have high touch will often have higher scores. Cultural differences can
certainly make an impact. Regional differences can impact the results.
But if you decide to engage in this process what I really want you to do is get a
benchmark Net Promoter Score for your company. Don't worry too much about
comparing it to others in your industry. Worry about comparing it to yourself and
you're able to move it up. Are you increasing the loyalty number or are you
moving down? It's really a gauge for you to pay attention to and move forward
especially in a small business. The other thing I want to warn you about is making
sure that we put act against for lack of a better way
cheating or what I would call gaming surveys. This happens all the time. You
will especially see this at a lot of car dealerships. A way of the game a survey
is when somebody walks you over to survey and says we really need to have
tens on all these questions. If there's a reason you can't give us a time tell us
now so we can fix it. You want to make sure that you're not having if you have
a team do this you want to make sure they're not picking only likely positive
respondents. You want to make sure people aren't deliberately sending surveys to
incorrect contacts or trying to game things. You want to make sure we're not
doing incorrect data sampling, that we're not manipulating time periods, that we
don't extend the survey and that we're not finding ways to make poor scores
ineligible. That's not the purpose we want to get really clean information and
build from there. I have this picture up there to remind me to tell you that
you've got to close the loop again if you ask you need to put a process in
place about how do you close the loop and take care of all the responses you
get. So let me give you an example of closing a loop let's say that we have
got our survey results and we have some detractor. So we have a detractor which
is somebody that's 0 through 6 who has given us feedback on their NPS score.
So the detractor is provided feedback the survey responses we've analyzed them
and process them. Our rules and I'll generate what what I would call an open
issue ticket where it's given to somebody which follows up a trigger to
initiate a customer call. The owner or whoever conducts the call to try to fix
the issue and better understand the problem with the customer. Unresolved
issues after those calls are escalated up to management. Then we use that
feedback and our frontline managers can use that customer feedback in learning
to coach our team. And then the management team would go on to monitor
performance and make sure that funds are always available for continued
improvement and more work in these initiatives. So again I am really giving
you a firehose of information about Net Promoter Score but if you do nothing
else today I want you to think about how
do you treat your loyal customers
employees please please do everything you can to create a good customer
experience for them. So why should you care? Why should you really care? Here's
why. Surveys show the 80% of you sitting out
there perhaps some of you listening today that home businesses believe that you
provide a superior customer experience. Here's the sad truth: only 8% of your
customers agree with that statement. So 80% of you believe you're providing it
only 8% of our customers do. That's what 8% looks like. Again 8% you
should start getting we're worried. 8% is about the number of people that keep
their New Year's resolutions should be making you really nervous.
So 8% is not a good number and if you think you're doing a great job for your
customers and they don't, you're really really doing it disservice for your
business and you're missing a great opportunity to build profitable business
by having your loyal customers come back, bring people with them, recommend you
with their brand. So make sure that you don't focus so much on your competition
that you forget to focus on your customers. It's really really tough. So
let me give you a couple recent customer loyalty experiences and I'm gonna give
you positive and negative from the same company. So I'm not really picking on a
company. So we were recently last week actually we were on a car on a cruise
with Celebrity Cruise Lines who I highly recommend to all of you. I think they're
a great company but here's an example of annoying bad profits. Where you come into
your room and we've you've got your bar set up in there with crazy prices for
things you don't even need or want that you have to ask to be removed from your
room for the fear that you're gonna get charged for all this stuff. And if you
look at some of the prices just doesn't make sense you're already on a
relatively upscale cruise and why do we go to this extent of taking
to that level. On the flip side with Celebrity Cruise Lines let me give you a
great customer service experience in a restaurant where the attention to detail
and your every need being met at every turn anticipating what you might want or
need was just incredible which creates a loyalty experience that makes you want
to talk positively and encourage other people to go engage in that experience.
So it wasn't a good meal, it wasn't a good service, it was an outstanding meal
and it was customer service and attention to detail that made you feel
like you were the only table in the room while you were there and you weren't. But
that's the way that it felt. So let me give you another example
from this to show you a small entrepreneur. This is St. Martin and in
really sad sad picture St. Martin is still devastated from the hurricane as
you can see from still boarded up buildings.
Tourism is starting to return slowly but surely but here's a tour guide among
tour guides it stands out. And I don't
have a really clear picture but you
don't have a guy unshaven and shorts and cutoff t-shirt that hawking something to
you. You've got somebody that took this to try to create a customer loyalty
experience level for you. And this tour guide is Mr. Bowtie. Unbelievable
experience what he's trying to create here and just taking things, standing out
trying to be a little bit different and despite all the challenges that are in
front of them. Let me just end here with one experience and I'm going
to use example from one of my favorite brands is the Marriott brand when it
comes to travel. And I like to stay in Marriotts and a recent experience
staying at at this Courtyard Marriott I'm going to give you an average
customer experience and I'm going to give you a loyalty experience. So again
I'm telling you big fan here. So I'm a loyal customer average customer
experience we show off the hotel, we had early flight out of Buffalo. We
were arriving early. Admittedly I think we got to hotel about 11 o'clock in the
morning. Went up to the desk the person was very nice very polite said your room
will be ready at 2 or 3 o'clock, that's about all they said and we can take your
luggage if you want us to. So nothing negative about the experience with just
an average experience on two hours later at work three hours later at one o'clock
I go to check-in and now we have a loyalty experience. The loyalty
experience went something like this. You go to check-in you give your name
immediately within three seconds Mr. Ulbrich thank you for being a loyal
customer of the Marriott, we see you stay with us a lot. Let me give you a room
upgrade let me get your luggage, we'll have it delivered to your room. Let me do
this this this for you never really giving me anything of value necessarily
that costs them any money but treating you like you were a loyal customer and
giving you that experience that makes you want to talk about it and makes you
want to go back and go back there over and over again, and recommend their
company. So the first experience was not bad and that's the experience that most
of us give to our customers and we literally call that good customer
service. You have this awesome opportunity with your businesses to
create loyalty experiences that don't have to cost you a ton of money that
will have people coming back and bringing their friends, that will have
people buying more. Focus on that loyalty experience I would encourage you to go
out right now and think about what are the simple little things we can do on
even from the aspect of as someone walks to the door, are we greeting people or
people just staring down at the register or at their desk. Think about all these
little interactions and what they mean to people because the reality is the
customer service experiences are so average out there if you can create a
loyalty experience you're going to have an incredible advantage over your
competition. So I promised you that I give you some resources with this webinar
will be posted. So Sametrix is a great company that you can engage with if you
want to learn more on your own, they have an academy that you can go through
online. There's um Fred Reichel's books if you're interested there are really
really good resources for you moving forward. So I'm gonna kind of end it
there. I don't believe we have any questions. So I want to thank you for
joining us. Again if you do have any questions please don't hesitate to call
us, send us an email if you're interested in any of our programs. Reach out.
Next month if any of you are in a partnership or in a family business
we're gonna talk about family business best practices on April 24 at 8:30
a.m. So again thank you so much for joining us. Hopefully we gave you a
little bit of good information that you can take away in use today. And go out
there and please please please don't forget that the customer service
experience out there is just OK at best. You have this great opportunity to
build some incredibly loyal customers by just taking a little bit of time to
engage in creating loyal customers by the experience that you give them. So
again thank you from the University of
Buffalo Center for Entrepreneurial
Leadership.
