'Loyalize' Customers by Remembering Their Needs

Want increased customer loyalty? Try crafting different treatments for different customers, one customer at a time, based not so much on the customer's value to you, but on what the customer needs from you.

When I’m on a business trip I’m a sucker for a quiet evening in my hotel room with a room-service pizza. One time at a Ritz-Carlton hotel I called downstairs for a pizza, then resumed working on my laptop until the knock on the door came about 30 minutes later. Only then did I realize I’d forgotten to request red pepper flakes with my pizza. I love red pepper flakes on a pizza. How do people even eat pizzas without red pepper flakes?

In any case, I opened the door and the waiter wheeled in the room-service table with my pizza, a soda, some utensils, and….a small dish of red pepper flakes! Hooray, I thought. At least this hotel serves a good pizza!

I signed the bill and as the waiter was about to leave, I asked him whether they served red pepper flakes with all their pizzas. “No,” he said, glancing down quickly to check his pad, “but you like them, don’t you?”

I had completely forgotten that this was not my first room-service pizza at a Ritz-Carlton, and they had already noted my preferences. From my perspective, it just seemed like they really knew how a pizza should be served!

Customized products and services are important tools for a customer-centric company, enabling it to deliver just the right product-service combination for each customer, even though different customers have different needs and preferences. And when you do meet an individual customer's personal needs, the customer will likely remain loyal simply because it will be more convenient.

Let me explain: There are many different dimensions to customer needs, including not just tastes but things like psychological mindsets, planning time-frames, or decision-making methods, and most such differences are unlikely to correlate with income, age, or ZIP code. If you’re a hotel chain, then some of your customers like red pepper flakes with their pizzas. If you’re an investment firm, you might find that some of your clients prefer a specific recommendation, while others prefer having a set of alternatives or options. And so forth.

To ascertain needs such as these (i.e., personal tastes or psychological pre-dispositions), it is essential to interact with the customer. Asking a “Golden Question” or two might help you categorize customers into different groups. But assuming you can gather the feedback and then act on it, you are in fact in a position to generate immense customer loyalty. The Ritz-Carlton could not possibly know that I prefer red pepper flakes on my pizza unless I tell them that I do. And by remembering this, they can make me loyal.

This is because when a customer tells you how he or she wants to be treated, and then you do treat them that way, you are providing them a kind of service they can’t get anywhere else at any price – at least not without first engaging in the same kind of interaction. If a customer teaches you how they want to be treated and you act on that by treating them in the way they prefer, then before they can get an equivalent level of service from one of your competitors, they first have to re-teach the competitor what they have already spent time and energy teaching you.

This is one of the primary reasons why people engage with the same e-commerce site over and over again, whether it’s NewEgg.com, or Amazon.com, or someone else – because once you’ve already given the site your credit card information and shipping address, it’s so much easier just to keep going with them. Provided, of course, that they don’t screw up, and that some other site’s prices aren’t significantly lower. I say “significantly” because most people aren’t going to give up all the convenience of shopping somewhere that already knows them unless the price difference is significant enough. It might vary with the customer, but convenience saves time and time is money, although different people will attach different values to it.

So if you want to loyalize a customer, try remembering some specific need or preference the customer has communicated to you in some way, and deliver on that need without having to be reminded.