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Earn the Rave: 5 Decisions that Earn Devoted Customers & Business Prosperity

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At the 2010 Clarabridge Customer Connections conference, Jeanne Bliss, president of CustomerBLISS, discussed her latest book, "I Love You More Than My Dog": Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad. The decisions your company makes tell others who you are and what you value as an organization. Customers can pierce your marketing to understand your true brand based on your ongoing decisions. To build customer loyalty-in fact, to go beyond that and win your customers' love-you need to make five decisions that Jeanne has identified as hallmarks of beloved companies. Her two years of research led to these five decisions that will help you create "financial prosperity and human prosperity" for your business:

1. Decide to believe. Say goodbye to cynicism and negativity and hello to trust and optimism. Beloved companies believe their customers. Zane Bikes sells $13M of bicycles a year from a single store and lets prospective customers take a $6,000 bike for a test ride with no identification or collateral. They lose two bikes a year to thieves but demonstrate their faith in their customers, rather than beginning the relationship questioning a prospect's integrity. Beloved companies believe in the truth of their customers' words. They don't doubt or question survey results or try to justify comments; they believe the comments. Beloved companies believe in their employees. They trust employees to do the right thing for customers without layers of policy. Unencumbered workers flourish: Wegmans has 7% turnover compared to an average of 18% in grocery stores in general.
2. Decide with clarity of purpose. When making decisions, companies adhere to their calling, which forms the basis of their brand promise. This clarity makes teammates out of coworkers and elevates people as they pursue a common goal. Ikea supports customers who can put more sweat equity than cash into their furniture purchases; their laser focus has paid off: they were the number-one furniture retailer in 2008 with over 500 million customers. Jeanne asks, "Are you clear about the memories you want to deliver, the people who belong in your company, the experience you are working toward? Are you executing tasks or achieving a higher purpose?"
3. Decide to be real. How can you get rid of the feeling of "big company, little customer"? Be careful of your internal language and acronyms for talking about your business, as it will leak out. AllState calls customers putting in claims "claimants" - who wants to be a claimant?! If your customers were eavesdropping on internal conversations, would you be proud of what they heard? The Container Store decided that everyone should be like Gumby - flexible; they only hire 3% of all employees that apply and invest 4x the average in their employees. The result? Double-digit growth every year since 1978. You can fake authenticity, but customers will catch on quickly. Beloved companies instead seek "to strike a chord with customers". They create opportunities for their employees to be themselves and to be at their best, demonstrating personality and creativity in serving customers.
4. Decide to be there. Your company has to decide to be present in customers' lives on customers' terms; this is the diet and exercise and regimen of serving your customers. Understand why customers truly do business with you - the benefits they seek rather than the features you provide, the aspirations that motivate them. Master the handoffs, of how each part of your organization serves a customer. Too often customers can feel like a hot potato, handed off from one department to the next. (At this point, Clarabridge staff threw beach balls into the audience for us to volley to one another!) Build your organization from the customer point of view and be there for them. RackSpace eliminated traditional corporate structure and built account-focused cross-functional teams, producing eight years of 60+% growth.
5. Decide to say sorry. Every company stumbles. How a company picks itself up reveals it character. Don't send out shallow, hollow apology letters. To apologize well, you need a peace-making process between your organization and your customers: swift response, coordination across the silos, humility and remorse, and a solution to the problem as soon as possible. Be proactive about apologies. Every morning Southwest Airlines reviews all flights from the day before to determine where they need to apologize for poor service, reaching out to customers before they complain. Organizations need to "syncopate" their silos to walk together. When Netflix was slow in delivering CDs, they apologized to customers and restarted the subscriptions of new customers to make up for the delay. What does your organization do to restore confidence and honor those customers you affected? When you make a mistake and recover with grace that customer is more loyal. Beloved companies seek forgiveness, and are loved the more for it.

Decide to become a beloved company!

Missed seeing Jeanne at the Clarabridge user conference? She will be delivering a keynote at Vision 2010 - another reason to attend!