Allegiance Blog

Arjun Sen, president and founder, ZenMango offered some great advice to companies today on retaining customers as part of the online Engage eSummit presentation that he gave titled: “The Leaky Bucket: The Secret of Eating an Elephant.” His advice:

• Know your customers – Who are they? What’s most important to them?  Etc.
• Make sure your employees’ point of view matches up with your customers’ point of view (and that all of your employees understand why each customer is important as well as the role that each of your employees play in retaining customers)
• Unite your marketing and operations teams and ensure they have a shared vision
• Realize every customer counts – Treat them that way; reward your employees for doing so
• Understand your leaky bucket (why customers are not coming back) and fix it (i.e. Identify your customers’ breaking points and decision to return points. In addition, go through the customer experience yourself and see and feel the pain through the eyes of your customers.)
• Improve and enhance your customer experience

Chris Cottle, VP of Marketing,  Allegiance

During the online Engage eSummit today, Bob Caruso, Managing Director, Endeavor Management, gave a presentation titled: ”Voice of the Customer (VOC) Initiative Success: Win Friends and Influence the C-Suite and Board.”

One of the many interesting points that he made during his presentation was how Colonel John Boyd, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and military strategist, was able to begin from nearly any position of disadvantage and successfully defeat opposing pilots in air combat maneuvering. 

As a result, Colonel Boyd developed a “decision cycle” known as The OODA Loop, which he believed was critical to his success in quickly adapting to his surroundings and surviving. This OODA Loop included four continuous looping steps:
1) Observe
2) Orient
3) Decide
4) Act

Caruso said the OODA Loop also applies to listening to the Voice of your Customers and using that information to improve your business via:
* Observe – Collect Voice of the Customer (VOC) information 
* Orient – Understand your customers’ behaviors
* Decide – Determine key levers
* Act – Implement changes

This loop is critically necessary in the world today. It’s about how quickly businesses can adapt and respond to a changing marketplace. And to accomplish this, it’s important to get feedback from your customer base and do it often and consistently, so that you have the data necessary to observe and rapidly respond. 

Kimberly Carroll
MarCom Manager, Allegiance

“In a crisis, be aware of the danger-but recognize the opportunity.”- John F. Kennedy

As part of today’s online Engage eSummit, Gary Tucker, SVP and General Manager of JD Power and Associates, talked about the importance of delighing your customers in the current economic environment, as well as the resulting increases in financial performance for companies that come with improving their customer satisfaction.

Tucker recommended five steps that organizations can use to pursue customer delight, including: 

1. Focus – Who owns the customer experience? Is everyone traveling down the same road? The companies that really stand out have a very clear understanding of who in their organization owns the customer experience. The companies that perform best have engrained that sense of ownership in everyone across the organization.

2. Quantify – What is most important to your customers? (It varies by company and brand). Companies often spend a lot of money in areas that don’t pay back. What are the drivers of customer satisfaction in your industry? Look at it through the lense of the people, presentation, price, product quality, and the process that a customer goes through. Each one of those five Ps represents an area of opportunity for your company to improve. Know what your drivers are so that you can focus your improvement on things that are going to have the most value to your customers–and the greatest payback for your company. 

3. Prioritize actions based on benchmarks – Who/what are my target customers comparing me to? Why are they defecting? Why are they shopping for an alternative solution? Knowing this information will help you understand and forecast your customers’ expectations and needs.

4. Define the business case upfront – What’s it worth to me in lower defection rates? Lower costs? Increased share? $$$$? Connect customer satisfaction activity with the same discipline and scrutiny is critical to getting the equation right.

5. Monitor and make course corrections – Getting good at delighting your customers is not an event. You’ve got to have a continuous customer feedback loop. Make sure that customers are feeling the changes that you’re making. If not, make course corrections. 

As Tucker pointed out, satisfaction is the path, but not the destination. The destination through an excellent customer experience is commitment–that part of a customer’s behavior that creates power for a brand. The primary input to commitment is the experience that customers have.

Kevin Mellander, Director of Customer Care, Allegiance