I've seen your ads in magazines or on TV. Yes, I know that you want me to buy your products, find value in your products, become a lifelong buyer of your products.

Yes, I know you have loyalty cards. And special sales just for your favourite customers. And email newsletters. Whole catalogs of goodies I can get with the points I earn by engaging with your company in all these different ways.

But you're not winning my loyalty. You're not even standing out from the crowd. You're not doing anything significantly different from your competitors and you're most definitely not offering me something that will actually be of value to me.

If you want my loyalty, my money, and perhaps even my evangelism in selling my friends on the value of your company, here's what you do.

Take all the money that you spend on loyalty programs (cards, software tracking systems, mailing invoices, producing and mailing catalogs, plus the dozens or even hundreds of salaries you pay to keep this engine running smoothly). And do this with it instead:

1. Invest in your front line. Increase both the number of people in your front line and the amount you pay them by 50%.
2. Train your front line not once but constantly how to be more responsive to clients. How to handle irate customers in a way that will keep them with the company. Teach them how to sell, in other words, even if they're supposed to be doing support.
3. Empower your front line people to not just follow procedures but to think, to learn and adapt and have empathy and most importantly, do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer.
4. Throw your highly technical completely unusable voicemail system in the circular file and get some real people on the phone to talk to your customers. If I wanted a dialogue with a computer system I would have used the web site instead.
5. Get rid of the corporate voice in your emails and snailmail spam and put one person's voice behind it. Have them talk to me, dammit, not the great unwashed masses. Tell me about things that will interest or have value to me personally.
6. Teach your people that everything they do, every single day, affects the customer and their perception of the company. Help your entire staff to understand that the reputation of the company is theirs, they own it, and they affect its power in the customer's mind with every decision they make. Give them ownership and help teach them to care for it.

If you want me to be a loyal customer, start by being loyal to me. Invest in our dialogue and we will both reap the rewards.

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