The secret to cultivating customer loyalty – with every customer that walks in your door.

The secret to cultivating loyalty with every customer that walks through your door.

Do you know what makes customers and employees develop loyalty to you? Your loyalty to them. You earn loyalty by meeting and exceeding your customer’s needs, in such a way that they perceive to be irreplaceable, over and over again, over time. There is no shortcut to loyalty and there are no guarantees that it will last; loyalty can be eroded more quickly than it can be built.

If it’s so much work, is it worth it? Absolutely. Loyal customers will buy your stuff, and will buy more of your stuff and loyal customers will keep coming back again and again to buy even more of your stuff. Loyal customers will not buy your competitor’s stuff. Loyal customers will refer their friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances to you. Loyal customers will even talk to strangers about you – they’ll sing your praises to anyone they think you can help.

While discounting has been the name of the game for the last couple of years once the effects of the recession really started to hurt the US consumer, discounting definitely doesn’t breed loyalty. Once your lower your price, a competitor is sure to follow, and you find yourself undermining the vitality of your own organization with absolutely nothing to show for it. As those who jumped in to location-based internet offers have quickly learned, many bargain shoppers are loyal to just one thing: the discount.

Many small business owners who tried deep discounts to get customers through the door or lowered prices and then marketed the heck out of their price point advantage are left scratching their heads because what they believed to be true, was not true. They believed that their products or services were totally relevant, that their facility was acceptable, that their staff were qualified and competent. They believed that if they could get them in the door once, they would come back again. but it didn’t happen.

Why not? One (or more) of their assumptions was not correct. Ultimately, the answer is that the customer experience created was simply not compelling enough to stimulate customer intrigue. Intrigue, you ask? I thought we were talking about loyalty. We are! Creating intrigue is the first step to the potential for a long-term, loyal relationship with a customer.

Intrigue (verb) meaning to fascinate, arouse the curiosity of, or amuse.

It might help to think of it this way; while you invest thousands and thousands of dollars on your facility, your personnel, your products and training and you invest even more than that in time and energy. But the customer only sees a microscopic portion of that investment. Some part of their 30, 60 or few-hour-long experience must stimulate intrigue in them in order for them to want to come back and/or to want to try something else that you have to offer.

The editors of television reality shows condense what they feel are the most compelling, provocative, exciting and important conversations, activities and events that occur over the course of a week or even longer, into a one or two hour-long show. That might mean distilling upwards of 168 hours (more than ten thousand minutes) into just 35 or 40 minutes of actual show time, minus commercials and “coming up next” teasers. They try to produce the most intriguing, engaging and provocative episode possible in order to entice viewers to watch the show again, to follow contestants, to visit their web sites and, in some cases, even to decide the outcome of the series via public vote.

Learn to think about and view each client visit as a condensed, exaggerated reality show. In other words, your client will only get to see, hear, smell and experience the elements that you decide – either intentionally or unintentionally – to edit down into the block of time they are present within your business. As the producer and real time editor of the customer experience, how can you orchestrate each one to be intriguing to every customer who walks through your door?