Seth Brickner

Check out any online com­mu­nity that deals with cus­tomer ser­vice (and believe me, I’ve checked out my share) and before long you’ll find a post­ing on “loy­alty.”  The top­ics are var­ied: “Loy­alty and Cus­tomer Sat­is­fac­tion;”  “Does qual­ity ser­vice always equal loy­alty?” etc.  The desire to under­stand loy­alty is sim­ple:  cus­tomer loy­alty is the “cur­rency” we use to mea­sure our cus­tomers’ satisfaction.

What are some of the major fac­tors that impact cus­tomer loyalty?

What’s the easiest thing in the world to sell?

One could make a good case for insurance.  If that wasn’t that the first thing that popped into your mind, consider the universal values to which insurance appeals:

• We want to feel secure, and insurance helps provide us with security. Even before we need to use it, we benefit from the feeling of security that simply owning insurance provides.
• We want to enhance and protect our wealth, and insurance is designed to do exactly that.
• We want things that are convenient and easy to use, and what could be easier to use than insurance? Buy it and the hard part’s over; all you have to do after that is go about your daily life.
• We like to feel good about ourselves. When we make intelligent choices that leverage our current assets to protect our future, we get a little boost to our esteem by having done some proactive planning.

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In a previous article on this blog we noted the amazing ROI that sales training can provide for retail employees.  Why, then, is this type of training seldom used in a retail environment?

Some long-held beliefs hold that it doesn’t make financial because:

• Employees probably won’t be around long enough to recoup the investment in their training.
• Since they’re typically non-commissioned, these employees don’t have a vested interest applying sales skill to their jobs.
• For the type of entry-level jobs that retail salespeople often occupy, there’s no need for sales training because customers already know what they need.

We can address each of these from the point of view of the employee.  Let’s...

Approximately 65,000,000 years ago, as pterodactyls were on their way out and USB devices were on their way in, printer cables were sold separately from home printers. That was standard practice.  Here’s how it worked:

You bought a printer from an electronics retailer or your local computer store, you took it home and eagerly removed it from the Styrofoam packaging, dreaming about the convenience of having a home printer.  Just as you were ready to connect it to your PC…what the? Where’s the printer cable? You searched the contents of the box, astonished to find that the most crucial component of the entire printing process was missing.  You knew at that moment that another trip to the computer store would be required.

Here’s what was absolutely criminal about the whole situation: the person who rang up your purchase, the person who let you leave the store without a printer cable to accompany your printer, knew...