This week I caught up with Shawn Cabral, Director of Marketing at Sitecore UK. Shawn has previously written for the Digital Marketing Magazine, explaining how to drive customer loyalty with a digitally connected leadership approach. We spoke about how loyalty has changed in the digital world.
How would you describe loyalty before digital?
“The original concept of loyalty was primarily centred on the quality of the personal relationships the customer had with the people representing a brand. Whether this was the bank manager, shop assistant or travel agent, the way they interacted with us, how they delivered the brand’s core values and product benefits contributed directly to building customer loyalty. This face-to-face ‘personal relationship’ began to fade as digital started to take hold. Loyalty is also built from familiarity, or an emotional connection with the brand - especially within the FMCG sector, and sometimes this is passed down from one generation to the next – we’re loyal to certain brands without really questioning why.”
Traditionally, how did they want to engage with businesses?
“Customers desire two-way interaction to build a solid relationship with a brand and it’s digital that opens up this interplay. Customers today wish to engage with the brand on ‘their terms’, although the challenge is how brands interpret these ‘terms’. Brands need to gain a deeper level of customer insight, understand a customer’s preferred way of communicating and lead the interaction in terms of predicting and anticipating their needs and desires, this then opens up real engagement. However, brands need this whole picture when looking at their customers, such as the channels they use and how they like to interact so they can engage accordingly with each individual customer. Digital marketing platforms offer marketers solutions that can offer this detailed level of insight, and also real-time flexibility to adapt to a customer’s changing needs.”
Customer satisfaction was the main factor in loyalty prior to digital, would you say that has changed? Or are customers satisfied in different ways?
“Prior to digital, customer satisfaction was one of the only elements we could measure. But now with digital we can gauge satisfaction more effectively across the entire customer experience through utilising digital marketing platforms. Today we can measure the ‘loyalty’ aspect before a prospect becomes a customer prior to any interaction with the brand, such as discovering whether the consumer is a fan of the brand and how a prospect moves towards purchase to the actual transaction stage. There may be customers who were previously satisfied with the brand but have had little or no interaction because of affordability or due to change of circumstance. These customers may still be ‘loyal’ to the brand and can be good advocates for other prospects.”
What would you say is the biggest driver of customer loyalty in a digital world?
“The key to true engagement still lies with the emotional connection a customer has with a brand. What the brand does to empower the customer’s lifestyle and affirm their aspirations can ultimately trigger the emotive driving force behind the solid and loyal relationship of a customer. Digital can create ‘moments of delight’, a brand recognising or rewarding a consumer at a moment where a gesture makes maximum emotional impact. Brands can also start to recreate the personal relationship of the sales or company rep and even go beyond customer insight through automated personal communication, timed around the individual behaviour, and converse with the customer without being prompted. This 360° experience from a customer/brand perspective will build that long-term relationship similar to the personal face-to-face experience we benefited from before digital came into play.”
How important is big data to providing customer engagement, and therefore satisfaction and loyalty?
“We are talking insight here, you need to use your data sources in a way that will be relevant for measuring loyalty in your sector. A great place to start would be to look at the differences between loyal customers and customers who leave, and identifying if there are there any obvious reasons why customers leave. How does your brand measure customer satisfaction, are you benchmarking your brand versus other brands in your sector, or benchmarking against the best in the world? If you are in a sector that is not renowned for excellent service for example, then benchmark against the very best. Digital is a marketing and a business enabler, and can help you make huge progress in delivering a customer experience that is more personalised and appropriate to the needs of your customers.”
By Jonathan Davies, Editor of the Digital Marketing Magazine.
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