In this article, we’re going to cover the ladder of loyalty. This is all about moving your customers from the very early stages of the customer process, right through to the point where they actually become your salesforce.
What’s the first stage?
The first step of the ladder is a suspect. A suspect is the biggest pool of people you can think of, that could be interested in your product or service. Think about target markets: everybody out there that could potentially purchase from you. Anybody at all who could have a need which you can satisfy.
Let’s think about mobile phones. A mobile phone suspect is anyone, because almost everybody needs a mobile phone. If we think about suspects for a mobile phone being pretty much anybody out there that’s above a certain age in a certain country, then they would be our suspects.
Now, not everybody is going to be taken or attracted to buying the most expensive or latest phone that may have come from Samsung or from Apple. So that would be a subsection of the suspects.
The next stage is a prospect
A prospect is somebody who has shown interest in some way in the product or service that you offer. They may have read one of your articles. They may have liked your page on Facebook, they may have come into your store, phoned you up, ordered a brochure, whatever it might be, but they’re the people that have identified that there could be a relationship to be had.
What are you doing at the moment to identify who those people are? What are you doing to generate those people? What are you putting out there in the form of marketing to create prospects? We sometimes refer to prospects as leads. These are people that have made some kind of contact with you. It could be that they have come to you, it could be that you’ve gone to them with some sort of outbound lead generation, but they’re essentially people who have made their first step into that sales funnel.
What systems and processes do you have to identify and to capture those prospects? What are you doing with your database to ensure you are testing and measuring, to make sure you are best placed to understand what’s working in generating those prospects or those leads for you? Because once we’ve identified who they are, we can take them through our sales process.
We’ve got our prospects and we’ve got our leads. Next you build a sales process that’s robust and is going to move through to the point where somebody becomes a shopper.
What is a shopper?
A shopper is somebody who has bought from you once, but not a customer.
People usually count themselves as being a customer once they’ve bought from you two or three times. But for the purposes of this qualification, we are saying that once somebody has bought from you twice, they move from being a shopper to a customer.
How do you ensure that happens? You give them fantastic service, with excellent delivery of your product or service, through your way of dealing with people.
So they’ve become a customer. And they’re coming back every now and again. How do you get more from them and get them higher up that ladder of loyalty? We give them some type of membership -a sense of belonging.
How do you do that with your customers? What are you doing with your customers to enable that kind of membership? Do you have a VIP club, a membership club, a discount club, an event?
You should be collecting data on your customers i.e. through newsletters. Once you have that membership, and you have people that feel that they get something from you in terms of perks or benefits, then they start to move up that ladder, and they start to become an advocate for you.
An advocate is someone that will speak well of you.
If we think about a restaurant setting: the person knows the restaurant, they almost fulfil that membership criteria. There might be something that doesn’t go very well in the restaurant for them that particular day, e.g. their food doesn’t come out as ordered, or the steak’s not done as it should be. An advocate will go away saying what wonderful customer experience they’ve received.
How do you ensure that happened? By having systems and processes in place. If somebody complains about their food, you must have a way of dealing with it quickly and efficiently. And in a way that actually makes the customer pleased. They then talk positively about you. Once we’ve got people to be advocates, where we really want to get them to is up on this top tier…
As a raving fan.
This is ultimately where we want to get people to because this is when they start to refer you, and become your salesforce. This is when they tell all their friends that they must check out your company.
Think about Harley Davidson. They’ve got raving fans: in fact, they’ve got people with tattoos of their brand tattooed on their body. If that’s not a raving fan, I don’t know what is! We want to get people to rave and get them referring you to their circle of influence. That’s where you want to get to, but we only get there by being aware of these different stages: getting people to be customers, getting people to become members… What membership scheme have you got? How are the phones answered? How are people greeted when they come to the office? How are people made to feel when they’re interacting with you on a service level?
Then when you have that, you can then get to the point where they become raving fans and they sell your product for you.
If there’s anything else you want me to cover, either in more detail here, or any other subjects at all, do let me know and I’ll make sure I cover that topic for you in future.
