Write an APA-style paper in response to the prompt below that addresses each of

Question

Write an APA-style paper in response to the prompt below that addresses each of the questions. Collect and analyze data from the library and/or the internet to support your original ideas. Click the "View/Complete" link below to submit your completed assignment.

Are Customers Really Loyal? “I’ll stick with you through thick and thin,” or “What have you done for me lately?” Which best describes the attitude of customers in today’s marketplace? Two quality managers are debating the concept of customer loyalty. One of them, Jack Hayes, claims that customer loyalty does exist, that it can be won, and that winning a customer’s loyalty should be every organization’s goal. According to Jack, “If you have a history of satisfying a customer, he will be loyal enough to overlook an occasional bad experience.” “No way,” says Anna Cage. “It takes only one bad experience to lose a customer.”

You are a customer. Are you loyal to any organizations? If so, how many bad experiences will it take to overcome your loyalty?

Have you ever decided to withhold your business from a store, restaurant, or other service provider based on poor service?

Do you usually give an organization more than one chance to win your business, or is one bad experience all it takes to turn you off?

Explanation / Answer

Customers Really Loyal

Customer loyalty is critical to a business. Not only does it help control marketing costs, as you're less dependent on constant customer acquisition, but there's a pleasure in dealing with regulars, as you build true relationships with people.

You might think that return business helps you know that you're doing something right, but that may not be the case. As The Consumerist noted, there are reasons that people buy from companies they hate. They may love the products but hate management, have no practical viable alternative, or competitors may be no better.

Loyalty is a tricky thing. You want it, but it has to come in the right way. Here are seven things you can do to improve the good type of loyalty and minimize people holding their noses while doing business with you.

Listen to customers

Remember the old saying that the customer is always right? Even more important is that the customer is actually there. One of the biggest insults you can deliver to people is to act as though they don't exist. It's a way of saying that someone has absolutely no importance or meaning. A company does this when it fails to respond to customer communications or even when it requires them to explain a problem time after time to different people. Invest in a CRM system and have people take notes. Make someone responsible for responding to emails, letters, and phone calls. Even if you don't ultimately agree with a customer's position, acting as though that customer exists means you've said that person matters, and the person will appreciate and remember it.

Connect with customers

People like to deal with those that make them feel comfortable. Some entrepreneurs do business in and around where they're from, so they can develop natural connections. If you're working with a more diverse customer base, you'll have to try harder to have that rapport. Don't pretend to be like them: It's insulting, creepy, and obvious. Instead, have your people find common ground. We are all more alike than we'd care to think. Look for those similarities rather than focusing on differences. As you show interest in which they are, you'll find they open up more and begin to relate to you, as well.

Be professional

No matter how difficult you find a customer, focus yourself and staff on being the consummate professionals. Although you've undoubtedly had experiences with people who have been rude or inappropriate, one of the best examples of how not to respond to customers is Amy's Baking Company. It parlayed a disastrous reality-television appearance into a complete social-media fiasco. Anytime you're about to talk to someone, think of how you'd respond if someone spoke to you the same way.

Communicate your value

It's easy for customers to take you for granted. There may be a veritable world of activity that goes on at your business to make their lives better and easier. But how will they know unless you tell them? Don't brag, but do inform people about the business processes and systems working for them. That helps customers appreciate what they get from doing business with you.

Have a plan

This and the following two ideas come from conversations I've recently had with experts in loyalty programs. You want to engage people and give them reasons to continue doing business with you. Don't do it on the fly. Think through issues such as what you can offer, how to avoid effectively bribing customers, and the logistics of tracking customer activity and tallying what they receive as a result. This can get far more complicated than a simple punch card that someone uses for a free cup of coffee, but the potential to benefit the business is much higher.

Use data

You accumulate data as people do business with you. Make use of it. What things go together? What are the signs that someone could become a bigger customer for you? Can you begin to anticipate what people will want so you can delight them unexpectedly? The better you know customers though their actions, the more effectively you can understand what they value and make doing business with you even more worthwhile.

Don't be boring

The cardinal sin in customer loyalty program upkeep is for companies to put plans into place and then never change them. When everything keeps going the same way, people tune out. Keep evolving your plans to increase customer loyalty.

Confusions and misunderstandings about customer loyalty                     

Confusing brand advocacy with customer loyalty.

Sometimes brand advocacy and customer loyalty are treated as synonyms. However, a loyal customer is not necessarily an advocate and the other way around (we’re being very strict now) a brand advocate is not ALWAYS necessarily a customer. Example: it’s not because you’re a huge fan and advocate of a very expensive fashion brand that you actually have the means to buy their clothes. Customer loyalty is also not the same as brand affinity. On the other hand, there is a strong link between customer loyalty and advocacy as we’ll cover further.

Confusing customer loyalty and customer retention.

This is probably where we see most confusion: in narrowing down customer loyalty to retention. Admittedly both are somewhat overlapping but there is a distinction. And even customer retention is up for debate. When do you ‘keep’ a customer? In services with annual renewal fees it’s easy to see: the customers you keep (retention) are those that renew their contracts (no churn). But what about a customer of a supermarket who buys at several supermarkets? He is not loyal. And have you really kept him as a customer if he only buys sporadically and turns out to buy more at other supermarkets? That’s why the type of business, timing, frequency and other contextual elements are often taken into account to define customer retention (and loyalty) for any particular organization. And it’s also why we typically distinguish between different types of “loyal customers”.

Confusing loyal customers and customer loyalty programs

Look it up: a huge percentage of information you find when you want to know about customer loyalty is really about customer loyalty programs. While such programs, if properly designed and executed contribute to loyalty, many don’t and in the end often become rebate programs, breeding/nurturing anything but loyal customers – and often even leading to less profit if the program is so focused on rebates that in the end no one pays the full price anymore.

Confusing satisfaction, service and experience

Last but not least, it’s important not to confuse customer loyalty with customer satisfaction which is merely a (relatively) driver and small indicator of it. Furthermore, customer loyalty is not just a matter of customer service or the contact center nor is it the same or only the result of a good end-to-end customer experience or individual satisfying, let alone ‘amazing’, experiences across various possible touch points and the full customer life cycle. On the other hand, the customer experience and customer engagement are becoming more important in a context of customer loyalty today as we’ll tackle further.

Attitude of customers in today’s marketplace

Today’s commoditized marketplace is flooded with products and services offering similar functionality and quality. This increasingly competitive marketplace means organizations need to stand out and connect more meaningfully with their audience.

With consumers presented with so many offerings from a multitude of brands, it is vital to focus your marketing strategy on engaging customers and building brand loyalty. You should think more strategically about what your brand as a whole represents and how it can connect with your customers’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.

Brand success often isn’t about individual products and services at all. It is about customers’ perceptions of an organization. To build long-term relationships, marketers should understand how their organization is perceived and tap into customers’ lifestyle preferences by demonstrating how their brand values relate. Once positive impressions are left, it is likely customers will keep returning.

Smartphone’s for example, all offer pretty much the same service, putting brands like Vodafone and Optus in a constant loyalty battle. In response, several providers have made a clear shift away from marketing product features to selling a lifestyle. The queues outside Apple stores when new products are launched (even when there is little difference to the previous version) illustrates the supremacy of resonating with customers’ attitudes and making people feel they must have the latest model.

You should aim to follow these successes by thinking about the mindsets of your customers. Think about their demographics and sociographics including their jobs, lifestyle, political attitudes as well as other characteristics. Then think about how your communications and marketing can best reflect these.

An organization that failed to hit the mark in 2012 is car manufacturer, Mazda. The company used the film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ The Lomax as a brand tie-in to market its SUV. It even went so far as to mention that the vehicle had the (obviously fictional) ‘truffle tree seal of approval’. While the brand was attempting to tap into, at the time, a currently popular film, the disconnect was so obvious that the campaign backfired spectacularly.

Brands like Apple understand the power they have over their customers and how they are perceived. But many other organizations are failing to recognize how their customers view them. It’s impossible to align your marketing strategy to connect better with customers if you don’t fully understand the drivers to purchase, and how they identify with your brand (as well as others).

These drivers include the desire to appear a certain way – such as fashionable, alternative or wealthy. People rarely purchase a sports car just because it goes fast and has brilliant handling. Most buyers will never have the opportunity to fully experience the true depth of those features. Rather, buying a sports car is about displaying success and being part of an exclusive club of likeminded people (other sports car owners).

While for most service providers purchasing decisions might be driven by cost, intangible factors such as reputation and attitude towards social responsibility also come into the mix. For instance, if you believe your customers are driven by the value of your services but they actually want to feel good about working with a humanitarian organization, then you risk misaligning marketing strategies and wasting your efforts.

An example of a brand that aligns its strategy very well by marketing almost entirely around its customers’ beliefs and attitudes rather than product is STA Travel. The company markets adventures and experiences, rather than airline tickets. Another popular brand, Sol Carves, markets itself as ‘the taste of freedom’. It has identified what matters to its target market – fun and freedom – and created their brand’s personality to match.

There is a fine balance to strike between creating a brand personality which connects with customers’ attitudes, and appearing insincere. Marketers have to get under their customers’ skin to determine who they are and how they want to feel.

Once you understand this, you can create highly targeted communications and marketing campaigns to ultimately attract more loyal customers.

You are a customer. Are you loyal to any organizations? If so, how many bad experiences will it take to overcome your loyalty?

I don’t believe that I am loyal to any organization, mainly because I am a person who will visit a store or restaurant on many occasions and not feel bad if one day I find myself going to another store for the same product I got from the other store or restaurant a week or so ago.

Have you ever decided to withhold your business from a store, restaurant, or other service provider based on poor service?

There has been plenty of bad experiences that I’ve had with stores and restaurants but I never really stopped going or boycotted because it. I will usually change the time I go or make sure to have someone else other than the personate the time of the incident.

Do you usually give an organization more than one chance to win your business, or is one bad experience all it takes to turn you off?

I do give organizations more than one time to win my business because not everyone is going to be how you would like them to be, but if it is a continuing thing where the service is poor and nothing within the organization is done to fix the problem, and then yes my business will go elsewhere.

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