How can you measure customer loyalty with a customer service mindset?

A customer service mindset pertains to the attitudes, values, and principles adopted by individuals or organizations when providing support and assistance to customers. It involves a commitment to excellence, empathy, and responsiveness in addressing customer inquiries, concerns, and issues. It emphasizes the importance of listening actively, communicating effectively, and going above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction. It also involves a continuous focus on improvement and learning from customer feedback to enhance the overall service experience.

To measure customer loyalty with a customer service mindset, organisations can use metrics like NPS, CSAT, Customer Retention Rate, Churn Rate, Repeat Purchase Rate, CES, and qualitative feedback. Regularly monitoring these metrics and feedback channels can help organisations enhance the customer experience, foster long-term relationships, and drive business growth.

The first step for me is always ensuring that I have the proper tools and analytics to actually hear my customers but I also never undermine the value that my TEAM brings to this. They are the frontline of our business and hear/see everything. If they tell me there is a trend, I look into it immediately. The next most pivotal aspect is to truly understand who you are as a company, a team, and a business as well as WHY you exist in the first place. Which need do you meet for your customers? This makes it easy to have checks in balances in your support experience. Do our policies and behavior meet our WHY? If not, change! If so, keep going!

Again, I go back to WHY does your business exist? Be honest about this WHY. Is it just to make money? Fine, then loyal customers will always help you do this. Is it to help solve a problem? Great, how does a lack of customer loyalty negatively impact your ability to do that?

Customer loyalty is crucial for businesses for several reasons: - Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, leading to a consistent revenue stream. - Acquiring new customers can be up to five times more expensive than retaining existing ones. - Satisfied customers often spread positive word-of-mouth recommendations. - They are less likely to switch to competitors even if they offer similar products or services. - They are more likely to provide valuable feedback and insights, enabling businesses to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points better. - It fosters long-term relationships, leading to greater customer lifetime value as customers continue to engage with a brand over time.

Feedback such as CSAT and NPS surveys can be a pivotal part of this measurement but in a lot of ways these feedback loops are outdated. You are only sampling a small number of your customers, many of whom, won't want to give you any feedback because they don't want to interact with your business anymore. I always look at the customers that "left" silently as well and explore their experiences. Did they meet friction? Were they the victim of a bad policy? Did the product not meet their needs in the way they thought it would? It can be difficult and time consuming to run this information but it is also rewarding!

Analytics, data, feedback loops- all of these are absolutely key and pivotal to understand your customer but at the end of the day if you are working to make your customers' lives as easy and pain-free as possible you are earning loyalty ten fold. As the great (& sadly late) Tony Hsieh of Zappos said perfectly: It's not rocket science, it's happiness science.