Tim Tyler

“If you strip away all the hype around how to ‘do’ relationships, you are left with one simple concept. The real essence of a relationship is simply a memory of past interactions.” [1]

Learning is at the heart of customer loyalty management and has been ever since the empirical work of Reichheld [2] (and others) in the early 1990’s showed that customer loyalty is directly related to corporate profits. Learning about customers and remembering them is central to the task of managing customer relationships.

Looking back all that way to the pre-Net Promoter Score primordial haze; Reichheld found 3 loyalty effects, each highly correlated with profitability,

The relationship between Customer and Employee loyalty is particularly relevant to loyalty management success, though it takes a longer term view of customer value.

Reichheld...

The Australian general insurance business has become a hot house of competition, with heavy promotion by new overseas online insurers.

Intense competition can be a catalyst for innovation and we believe that one insurer is innovating in a refreshing and effective way – by collaborating directly with customers.

The Buzz began life co-creating with customers. Through focus groups, market research and an online community / ideas exchange called ‘My Insurance Ideas’ the IAG-backed team shaped the company that became The Buzz. (Interest declared; we help The Buzz).

A consistent and dominant theme in these thousands of customer conversations was that insurance consumers are looking for an insurer who appreciates and recognises customer loyalty and customers want to be treated as an individual.

Given the ubiquity of no-claims bonuses in...

Every now and then I like to go back and read past work from the giants of our craft, and Philip Kotler certainly qualifies as a good set of shoulders for us to stand on so we can see further. In 2000 Mr. Kotler published “Marketing Management, Millennium Edition” (2000, Prentice Hall) and given the occasion, he looked forward and predicted the issues that Marketing would be dealing with in the new century.

Almost a decade into the 2000′s, I can say I think he was correct. He may despair that we are still to resolve the issues, but he was correct in identifying the major tasks in what we have (un-poetically perhaps) called ‘do marketing’.

So with comments based on our client...

Measuring the effectiveness of customer loyalty programs has always been a bit of a problem.

We know the objectives of these programs clearly, customers who;

• stay longer
• consolidate their spending with you
• recommend you to their family and friends

but even if members exhibit all of these behaviours, how can you be sure it is because of your customer loyalty program investments, or your products or even your other marketing efforts?

In other marketing channels we add credibility to claims of causality for our campaigns by holding back a portion of our customers in a control group. We try to ensure that this group is exposed to everything except the campaign we are measuring. This way, if there are differences in responses between the control and test customers it must be due to the campaign because that is the only difference.

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