What is the difference between Customer Loyalty and Customer Service?

A lot of companies look at their customer service as an opportunity to improve their business, which is a valid thing to do..

But most do not stop to consider, what distinguishes customer loyalty and what distinguishes customer service. Many have the two collapsed.

The difference between customer satisfaction surveys and customer loyalty surveys is that?customer satisfaction surveys are focused on measuring customers' current attitudes, whereas customer loyalty surveys focus on predicting customer behaviour and attitudes.

Customer Service

Customer service is in fact just one part of what makes up the whole when it comes to Customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is based on the total experience of any interaction or transaction, not just one part of.

For example:

Staff can be friendly, but not helpful.

Staff can be helpful but not friendly.

You know those times when you received great customer service but had to wait too long to be acknowledged let alone served. Even though you finally received great customer service, you're so sick of waiting.

I've just put my car in for service the actual experience of taking the car in and collecting the car was really good. They were lovely, friendly, gave me an accurate time that the car would be ready for pick up. When collecting the car they explained what they did and the service seems to have been done really well and the car was beautifully washed.

But it took me five calls to try and book the car in. On the first call, I was told someone would call me back and never did and this pattern was repeated for the next four calls I made.

If there was another place (their competition) I could have gone to I would have. There isn’t. there's only one. I ended up booking it in online, which I personally don’t like to do.

If it was just about the customer service, I experienced onsite I might look at the customer service I received on that day and go, yeah, it was really good. But when I look at the overall customer service, I’m left with the very poor telephone service I received – no call back, the number of calls I had to make, and the fact I had no choice but to use their online booking system to get my car booked in for a service in the first place.

Their telephone booking system let them down. It is clear to me that there is a problem with the process for following up on messages.

The bottom line is I’m certainly not going to be actively recommending them to my friends and colleagues, right! That’s exactly what I’m discussing in this article.

Satisfaction is not enough. It must stand out.

The Customer Loyalty work I do with my clients ensures they:

• Understand exactly what their customers are saying about their experience in doing business with them
• Coach their teams to deliver 10/10
• Get their Customer loyalty system right

It's about knowing exactly what drives customer loyalty within their business - what are the loyalty drivers that generate word-of-mouth referrals and repeat business and then how to implement a system to ensure all customers receive the same 10/10 customer experience they deserve and love.

Understanding exactly what your customers are saying: To 'factually know' what your customers say means you are using a type of rigour or statistically proven method to capture a valid number of your customers' experiences. We use the Net Promoter Score (NPS?), a globally proven method to measure your customer ‘Word of Mouth (WoM)’.

Coach your teams to deliver 10/10: Once we've identified your customers' true experience, we use that information to train and coach your teams - from the CEO to the Frontline - to improve your customers' experience going forward.

We use key insights to determine each clients businesses loyalty drivers, as you will see with the following examples there are an average of at least 7 key areas that drive customer loyalty.

This first one is a business that repairs engines.

?62% of customers surveyed mentioned, unprompted, workmanship as an area that stood out to them. The reason they said it stood out is listed below:

Key Insights: They sort out customer’s issues better than anyone else, they pick up things we didn’t know about, they are very thorough with diagnostics and repairs, they always clean up before handing the truck back, they get the job done when others can’t.

59% mentioned, unprompted, that prompt and efficient service as a reason it stood out. Why?

Key Insights: They always diagnose and fix problems promptly, they are quick to find faults with the engine, they are spot on with our timing for all services and repairs, they get the work done earlier than we expected, they don’t keep us waiting for anything.

These other areas were also mentioned:

?3. 46% mentioned HELPFUL

4. 44% mentioned COMMUNICATION

5. 28% mentioned BOOKING Experience

6. 19% mentioned KNOWLEDGE of the people

?17% mentioned friendly service as standing out. Why?

Key Insights: They are always nice and professional when talking to customers, they have smiles on their faces whenever we deal with them, they greet us by our first names, they always say hello when we see them in the workshop, they are always easy to talk to.

The point of the above is that it takes all of these areas to drive customer loyalty, friendly service plays an important part of that experience.

I’m sure it will not surprise you that with our hospitality clients. Food is the number one area mentioned along with prompt and efficient service; the facilities and layout of the venue; friendly customer service; helpful service; the menu; and the price.

Or in a retail example the product or products they sell are the number one area mentioned, along with helpful, communication, price, speed of service, friendly and knowledgeable staff.

Every area is defined with a key insight, so we understand exactly what we need to do to ensure customers leave the business as loyal customers. This means they will definitely come back and tell other people.

In any business, there are always variations, between people, in output, in service and in product.

The above examples show what the key loyalty drivers are. We also get another list from the research; these define the most important improvements.

If we look at the Engine service example.

If we use workmanship as an example, you can see the difference between the comments, just about the opposite of each other.

With the workshop teams we go through the results and we focus on getting the systems right. This comes down to distinguishing the difference between their customer loyalty drivers and variation, as well as understanding causes of variation. It is key to management’s ability to properly remove problems or barriers in the system.

We often focus on the moment without focusing in on the system. Many times when we do what we see is poor communication or poor delivery or not delivering on your promise and not keeping people informed, depending on what type of businesses.

Customer Loyalty is all about all the system related aspects you implement to manage the elements that impact the customer's overall experience. And yes, that includes customer service.

If you want to look at customer service, that’s great, but it is important to note, it can be quite a narrow focus, instead, I invite you to look at customer loyalty.

Do you ‘factually know’ what your customers are saying about you? If you don’t, then you are missing an essential ingredient to your revenue growth.

Do you know what drivers loyalty within your business? Are they what are they what you think they are? Or are they something different?

If you would like to have a chat with me about "the Difference Between Customer Loyalty and Customer Service?"?contact me?I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Craig