Earn Customer Desire and the Right to Grow

I’m introducing a new word for you to consider: customer desire

Its time to replace the word ‘customer loyalty’ with the word customer desire.

What I’ve experienced and observed is that ‘loyalty’ can be something to go get from customers, rather than something to be earned.

Loyalty is often defined in this manner because someone has run numbers to correlate that customers who own two products rather than one are more loyal or worth more. This drives behavior to try to get more loyalty by pitching that second product or second service. That leaves the hard work of building reliable experiences out of the equation. And it makes customer loyalty focused on the upsell or cross sell to get customers to buy more.

But you can’t earn loyalty without reliability

That’s why I harp on about the phrase “earn the right to grow.” If you deliver a reliable experience, your customers and clients will desire to have it again. Desire is an emotion that will earn growth and prosperity for your business.

Within the 5-competency framework, Competency 4 (Experience Reliability & Innovation) builds the discipline for doing the hard work to deliver reliability and earn customer desire.

Take Action:
Prevent Customer Breakdown by Being Deliberate about Customer Experience Reliability
Clarifying the Role of the CCO – Competency 4 – This post is part of the article “Five Competencies for Chief Customer Officers” that originally appeared in the free eBook The 2015 Customer Experience Outlook, a collection of ideas from customer experience authors, designers, and industry leaders.