Danny Meyer, restaurant entrepreneur and innovator extraordinaire, said in his book, Setting the Table:
“Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction.”
He’s right. Which can be good news or very bad news, depending of course, on how you make your customers feel. What you want them to feel is simple: You want them to feel you care about them. Here’s what the National Study of Customer Loyalty had to say about that:
“Regardless of industry, when an individual strongly agrees that a company cares about them and satisfying their needs, levels of total satisfaction, strong company preference, loyalty, willingness to recommend, and willingness to go out of their way are also extremely high.”
Two Hallmark executives (Scott Robinette and Claire Brand) wrote a wonderfully insightful book entitled Emotion Marketing. In that book, the authors reported on a Hallmark/Harte-Hanks study on customer loyalty. The study examined four variables: caring, trust, length of patronage and overall satisfaction. As it turns out, caring is twice as important as any of the other three variables in predicting loyalty.
How your customers feel about how you feel about them really matters. And, that’s especially true when there is little competitive differentiation in product or price and supply exceeds demand.
