Companies are misguided nowadays by the notion that customers depend on them, when the truth of the matter is that companies are dependent on those customers. Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is now essential for a business or company to survive. So what is the difference between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and how to companies and or business achieve this? Also when you have difficult customers how do you achieve customer satisfaction?
It’s essential that companies or businesses today listen to their customers. No company or business today can afford to disregard the importance of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Aren’t they the same thing? No, they are absolutely not and they are enormously
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Customer loyalty is much harder to obtain that customer service satisfaction. The most important first step is to satisfy the customer by meeting their expectations. Customers only give a company one chance and if they aren’t satisfied they will not do business with that company again, as well as tell others of their experience. The next step would be to exceed the customer’s expectations. If a business goes above and beyond to assist the customer they begin to build loyalty. The next step is to truly surprise the customer. In order to dominate the marketplace the company must find a way to make them selves stand out with their product or service, accompanied with phenomenal customer service. Once this has been done customer satisfaction and loyalty will be gained. “Acquiring a new customer can cost four or five times more than keeping a current customer” (Bestmark, 2013). So it’s essential to keep the current customer’s happy and coming back for more.
Some of the ways that businesses can build loyalty would be by offering loyalty programs, Interacting with customers, surveys, creating institutional ties, and personalized marketing. Another way to build loyalty is to treat your employees so well that they treat your customers well. If you have happy employees they will treat your customers happy. “The link between satisfaction and loyalty however is not proportional” (Kotler, Keller, 2009, p71), so businesses must
Customer satisfaction is highly important to an organization as it leads to customer loyalty and
Customer Loyalty: Understanding the pulse of the customer and providing exceptional customer service by offering the fair measures of product policies like discounts, return policies of retailing and thus enhancing the business policies.
Today’s organizations fail to realize the value of their customers when it comes to the success of their business. Without customer loyalty the success of your business will always be uncertain. Organizations must sensitively tailor the designs of a successful firm to the particular challenges of understanding, attracting, and keeping valuable customers. “Having satisfied customers just aren’t good enough”. Kenneth Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, co-authors of Raving Fans, believe this concept is needed to have a successful business. I agree with this concept of customers being the focal point of any business. I would want more than just a satisfied customer; I want a “Raving Fan”.
Loyal Customer can mean a consistent source of revenue over a period of many years. However, this loyalty cannot be taken for granted. It will continue only as long as the customer feels they are receiving better value than they would obtain from another supplier. There are many approaches companies can usefully adopt to measure loyalty and many companies keen to help with various tools and techniques. A large number of retailers have become so focused on customer basket analysis, profitability and driving down operating costs that they have forgotten to listen to the real voice of the customer. Indeed in a Bain Company survey in 2005, 80% of companies believed they were delivering a superior customer experience; only 8% of their customers agreed.
In today’s business setting, having an edge against rival companies can make or break you. Loyalty is that edge that will have your company profiting and the customers returning. Frederick Reichheld’s theory, The Loyalty Effect, is one of the most useful and needed business strategies. Without loyal employees within a company, your company is destined to fail. I consider myself a very loyal person, not only at my job, but in all aspects of life. I am a manager at Maui Nix Surf Shop and every part of the job is based on loyalty such as opening the store on time, cash deposits, or staying on task with overseeing the store. I plan on becoming a computer engineer and hopefully working for a company like Google or Apple. I love their business
You can prevent the loss of precious, non-refundable minutes of your life spent on paperwork or problem solving for customers by preparing ahead of time. Keep your customers happy, prevent dissatisfaction: start by investing in your employees training opportunities to respond to incidents before they occur. You can overcome unavoidable service breakdowns via a process known as service recovery. Through service expert Solomon’s (2014) method we can utilize the acronym A.R.F.D.: Apologize, Review the complaint, Fix the problem (also Follow-up), and Document. Additionally, good customer service and building loyalty consist of being sharp, knowing what you are talking about, and giving the customer what they want. Customers will leave for competitors when their needs or expectations cannot be met from your business. The outcome of maintaining customer loyalty is having consistency, and that by building good relationships with consumers will continue to provide future profit and support your business.
By and large, loyal customers will be beneficial to a brand as it can reduce the cost of marketing. Moreover, customer loyalty can be made the most of brand extension and market penetration strategies. As a final point, “loyal customer is an asset for a brand, and has been identified as major determinant of brand equity” (Dekimpe et al., 1997:20).
With more and more suppliers in the market place, customers have more diversified options regarding products, prices and shopping places. Therefore, marketing departments gradually come up with ideas on retaining current customers which brings in the concept of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is the ongoing process of customers buying products or services from a specific company (Gustavsson, 2005). For most companies, retaining customers costs less than attracting new ones and also reduces expenses on promoting products. In order to reach this aim, the organization constantly increases customer loyalty by carrying out loyalty programs to reward the remaining customers for repeated transactions (Donnelly, 2009).
Dick and Basu (1994, p. 99) define loyalty as “the strength of the realtionship between an individual’s realtive attitude and their repeat
Simply, long-lasting customer loyalty is acquired when a customer is willing to come back to the organization from times to times to enjoy the products or services offered despite the availability of other organizations who offer the same kind of products or services. This is hard to acquire with just mere marketing. In fact, marketing creates an image for an organization to grab consumers’ attention the first time consumers catch glimpse of the organization. However, keeping them coming back requires the involvement of more factors, mostly the quality of the products or services.
In a competitive marketplace where businesses compete for customers, customer satisfaction is seen as a key differentiator and increasingly has become a key element of business strategy.
The importance of this issue in today’s global marketing practices has been one of the
A similar research Loyalty in Retail: A strategic success or a management failure states that successful loyalty programs do not exist in vacuum. The loyalty cards provided by the retailers are compared to the hammer. Just as a hammer does not build a house, a loyalty card does not build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty has been used as a strategic approach in increasing customer value and thus providing a good customer experience but it doesn’t work alone. A brand value has to be created in which involvement of the staff, quality of the products, knowledge about the customers etc. are required.
The purpose of this research is to study the relationship between customer satisfaction and consumer loyalty and apply its relationship into all the market industries including products and services, particularly in financial institutions. Preliminary sample data (N=80) will be collected from faculties and students at Johnson and Wales University of all ethnicities, national and international students. The hypothesis of the study is developed as H1: There is a significant positive relationship between customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. A t-test for independent samples is used to address the hypothesis. The discussion of the study indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, however, it is important to fully understand that the loyalty which is the main goal of each industry is very hard to achieve and is not very easy to be reached by industries due to the customer satisfaction which is very hard to reach by itself, and the service quality as well. There are many other variables that can affect the consumer loyalty such as the high level of competition among today’s companies and the fast track of technological advancement. These reasons indicate that companies should work hard because loyalty is a fleeting issue, today’s loyal customer would not be tomorrow’s loyal customer.
Most companies struggle for customer loyalty as the competition reaches at its peak in telecommunication sector. Indeed, customer satisfaction is integral part in determining why customers leave or stay with an organization. Therefore, organizations need to know how to keep their customers. Every organization has come to realize that in order to survive, it has to acquire and then retain profitable customers. Company should consider those customers which shows high satisfaction which leads to customer loyalty .this result in increasing company’s profitability. Company should also focus on customers who are not satisfied in order to increase profitability.