Are You Focused on What Matters Most to Your Customers?

The greatest opportunity for moving the needle on customer loyalty—that critical factor for driving long-term growth and maintaining a competitive edge—isn’t going to be found in a piece of technology, or even a new product or feature.
Companies tend to talk a great game about their focus on customer loyalty and great customer service, touting commitments to exceed expectations and go above and beyond for their customers. But could those efforts be backfiring? A study by Gartner found that customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty. What’s more, an “above-and-beyond” strategy focused on exceeding expectations is not only expensive and hard to do, it’s not necessarily making customers loyal.
In fact, the big opportunity for increasing customer loyalty lies in building value for our customers. Research shows there are three types of customers: dissatisfied customers, rationally satisfied customers and emotionally satisfied customers. Neither dissatisfied