The Myth of Customer Loyalty
It’s Christmas time again.
I used to hate Christmas just because I hate being bombarded by the same old carols and adverts. I get so sick of them. But recently I’ve decided to drop my crap and embrace the Christmas spirit.
This time of year, people I’ve worked with send season’s greeting emails wishing me a merry Christmas and a prosperous new year.
As a side note…
I was compiling one of those same merry Christmas emails to send to my valued customers and then had a realisation. I removed all traces of merry Christmas, rewrote the email to wish them a prosperous 2010, told them a little about how we grew in 2009 thanks to their support, and saved the email in my drafts to send mid-January.
Why? Because if I send Merry Christmas, they say thanks, delete, go on holiday and forget me. If I send Prosperous New Year mid January, it’s the same best wishes from my sincere heart, but they’ll be reading it right at the point where they’re winding up to a new year.
Anyway, as I was saying:
This one end-of-year email said, “We wish all our loyal customers a Merry Christmas”. That made me think.
Customers are not loyal, at least not in the way we think. They come to us because they get something from us that they don’t get elsewhere. That doesn’t make them loyal, it simply makes them human; actually, even animals do that.
If they were loyal, then they would keep coming back even if they stopped getting from us what they couldn’t get elsewhere, and that’s not the case. If a customer gets a better deal elsewhere, they’ll go elsewhere.
Unless…
The key is to build relationships, i.e. find ways to relate, and the only way we can do that is through two-way communication.
Loyalty is relational. As we build relationships with our customers, then loyalty kicks in. If you want loyalty, you have to focus on the one thing that no one else can provide as well as you can: YOU.
You provide something as a unique person that no one else can provide.
Some might say that this is mere semantics, a play on words, and yet it’s not. It’s an entirely different psychology when you look at your customers as loyal customers, and when you look at them as loyal friends.
The difference is that when customers are loyal, they’re not being loyal to your business, products or services. They’re being loyal to YOU.
Understanding this difference allows you to take smart actions that make your company more relationships-focused.
If you think your customers are loyal just because they keep coming back to you, you might be in for some disappointment somewhere along the line, unless you understand the true source of their loyalty, and can focus on giving them more of that.