Sandy Rogers understands customer service and loyalty. He is the former senior vice president for corporate strategy at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and is currently the leader of FranklinCovey’s Loyalty Practice.
Rogers’ story at Enterprise Rent-A-Car is one for the customer service history books. During his tenure at Enterprise, he was part of a team that focused on improving service to drive customer loyalty. In 10 years, the company’s satisfaction ratings and NPS scores increased from 67% to 80%. The results were much more than just increased numbers. Customers were happier and service quality was more consistent. Best of all, here’s what made it worth the effort:
Sales tripled!
Rogers, along with co-authors Leena Rinne and Shawn Moon, wrote a book titled Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion. It’s not about the Enterprise experience specifically, but focuses on the notion that increased customer satisfaction translates to more sales. The book also serves as a guide to how to achieve this … faster. Here are a few of the major takeaways:
The biggest factor in customer loyalty is empathy: Customers who give you high marks on a survey are telling you they’re happy, but that doesn’t mean they are loyal. I’ve always said that satisfaction is a rating, but loyalty is an emotion. You can’t always explain loyalty with facts and figures. There’s an emotional side. It comes from the company’s employees understanding the customer’s wants and needs and the empathy they display for those customers.
Empathy starts on the inside with employees: What happens on the inside of an organization is felt on the outside by its customers. The way employees are treated has a direct impact on how customers are treated. If the internal culture of a company fosters empathy and emotional engagement, it will have a similar positive impact on the customer’s experience.
Practice a mentality of hospitality: “We all know how to make people feel warm and welcome in our homes,” Rogers says. “But can we bring that hospitality mentality over the phone, online, and in person?” In other words, make the customer feel at home, metaphorically speaking. That level of engagement drives the emotional connection that, in turn, drives loyalty.
Empower employees to deliver the best level of service they can: The word “empowerment” may be a bit overused, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Let your employees come up with ideas to improve the customer’s experience. That means allowing them to break tradition and go outside of the established policies and processes. First, they must be properly trained. Then, the culture must allow them to take chances and reward them for doing so. Management must lead the charge to advocate empowerment. Good ideas for improvement could come from anyone – from the frontline agent to the CEO.
A regularly scheduled “loyalty huddle” is essential to creating customer loyalty: Take time with your team to focus on customer service and loyalty principles. Having brief, regularly scheduled meetings – say, once a week for 10 to 15 minutes – will keep the concept of loyalty front-of-mind. These meetings are opportunities for mini-training sessions and reinforcement of the most important loyalty principles. Rogers states, “If you’re serious about staying fit, you don’t stop going to the gym after finishing a program. If you’re serious about bringing loyalty principles to life, you do them over and over again.”
Loyalty is more than points and rewards: My opinion of many “loyalty programs” is that they are not loyalty programs. They are marketing programs. There’s a difference. Points or rewards programs can be copied by competitors. True loyalty is driven by empathy and emotional engagement. You must connect with a customer at a level that goes deeper than rewards points.
Adopt a loyalty mindset: This is about having loyalty for everyone in your life, not just customers and employees. Practice loyalty techniques and treat people with respect and empathy to build a following. Creating loyalty with others is not just a goal. It corresponds to how you behave and how you treat others. It’s genuine, because it’s who you are.
I’ve talked before about the need for authenticity in business. Loyalty ties into that. Loyalty is driven by a human, emotional connection, which you cannot have without maintaining a certain level of authenticity. If you want to earn your customers’ unwavering loyalty, take Rogers’ advice – and mine. Insert just a little bit of vulnerability, some empathy and a lot of authenticity into your customer service, and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. After all, the companies that succeed are the ones that focus on building customer relationships.
