How do you keep your customers loyal?
"Capture and understand the difference and potential between only meeting customers and developing customer loyalty based on the meetings."
Companies and organisations want to hold on to the customers who are right for them. One strategy they often use is to elicit customer feedback about the service, competiveness and price level.
Research shows, however, that direct questions about future behavior are almost impossible to answer. They should therefore be avoided in studies investigating future loyalty. Focusing on sensitivity in customer relationships may offer fruitful glimpses into the future!
Customer switching behaviour is the key
For many years companies seeking to understand customer relationships have focused on customer satisfaction. It is important, but it only gives a fragmented picture. Customer expression of satisfaction represents the communicative part of the relationship, but leaves out contextual issues such as the impact of competitors and changes in customers’ lives.
Mapping the customer relationships
Companies and organisations want to continuously deepen their knowledge about customer relationships and learn about their own customers. The basis for the deepened knowledge is to map customer relationships from a switching perspective.
Such a qualitative procedure defines customer relationships for the particular company from the customers' perspective. Other kinds of measures and decisions in companies are easier to complete given the company-specific basis formed by the customer relationship mappings.
Ph.D. Sc (Econ) Inger Roos is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden and active consultant at Roos Consulting in Jakobstad, Finland.
Before joining Karlstad University, Roos was a businesswoman, owning and running a supermarket for 20 years. During this time, through the successful use of customer panels and personnel feedback groups, she was able to develop her practical skills in relationship marketing.
Co-operations
Inger Roos has co-operated with many different companies, ranging from small businesses to major international corporations. One example is the long-term research project being conducted in cooperation with Telia, the multinational telecommunications company and mobile network operator present in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The co-operation began in 1999, and the starting point was that not all factors in relationships are equally relevant to loyalty, which was found to be important knowledge for loyalty-enhancing communication.
