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Seven Secrets of Driving Customer Loyalty – and Profits

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In these rough and recessionary times, it’s important to escape the commodity pricing wars and to find ways to strengthen the marketing backbone of your company. The most reliable and affordable way to achieve both these goals is by building a strong personal bond with your customers. Loyal customers see you as more valuable than a mere commodity purveyor, and can serve you as a powerful marketing arm, going out of their way promote and defend your company online and off – for free. Here are seven ways to get process started of building customer loyalty.

  1. Did you shine that doorknob? Research shows that customers remember the first and last minutes of a service encounter much more vividly – and for much longer – than all the rest of it. Make sure that the first and final elements of your customer interactions are particularly well engineered, because they are going to stick in the customer’s memory.

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    About the Author

    Micah SolomonMicah Solomon is the co-author with Leonardo Inghilleri of Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (AMACOM Books) and President of Oasis Disc Manufacturing. His free online resource site for customer service advice is CollegeOfTheCustomer.com.

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Leadership Inspirations – Continual Fear

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“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915)

American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher, most famous for his essay A Message to Garcia

The New Thinking on KPIs, part 3 of 4

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The four types of performance measures

I have come to the conclusion that there are four types of performance measures, as shown in Figure 3. This conclusion has come from: the research I have conducted; workshop feedback across diverse industries; and as a by-product of writing my book “Key Performance Indicators – developing, implementing and using winning KPIs”.


Figure 3: A scorecard with six perspectives

  • key result indicators (KRIs) – give an overview on past performance and are ideal for the Board as they communicate how management have done in a critical success factor or balanced scorecard perspective
  • performance indicators (PIs) – tell staff and management what to do
  • result indicators (RIs) – tell staff what they have done
  • key performance indicators (KPIs) – tell staff and management what to do to increase performance dramatically.

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About the Author

David Parmenter, author of Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs and Pareto’s 80/20 Rule for Corporate Accountants, is an international presenter who is known for his thought provoking and lively sessions, which have led to substantial change in many organizations. He is a leading expert in developing winning KPIs, replacing the annual planning process with quarterly rolling planning, accelerating month-end processes, and converting reporting to a decision based tool.

David’s work on KPIs has received international recognition with clients in Auckland, Wellington, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Tehran, Prague, Dublin, London, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh. David is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales and has worked for Ernst & Young, BP Oil Ltd, Arthur Andersen, and Price Waterhouse Coopers.

David’s recent thinking is accessible from www.davidparmenter.com. He can be contacted at [email protected] or telephone +64 4 499 0007.

This articles is an extract from his “Implementing winning KPIs” whitepaper which can be downloaded from http://davidparmenter.com/how-to-guides)

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 35 – An Interview with Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 35 – An Interview with Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards explores the motivations, conflicts, limitations, roles, and ethics of corporate boards; answering the often asked question of why Boards and their members behave the way they do. During our discussion, Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards: Managers of Risk, Sources of Risk and Professor of Finance and holder of the Frank W. Considine Chair of Applied Ethics at Loyola University Chicago, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • the Board of Directors’ role in managing upside risk
  • how companies deal with the risk of diminished Board independence that occurs when the CEO is also the Chairman of the Board
  • what time-inconsistent misconduct is and why it occurs
  • why compensation plans may encourage executives to engage in exceedingly risky merger and acquisition deals and the actions Boards take to mitigate this risk
  • the Board’s role in establishing executive compensation, including those mechanisms that result in unduly rewarding failure
  • who the Board of Directors should serve… just shareholders or a broader group of stakeholders that includes shareholders, employees, the environment, and society

Additional Information

Robert’s book, Corporate Boards, can be purchased by clicking here.

About the Author

Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards, holds PhDs from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in philosophy and finance and has taught at the University of Florida, Emory University, the University of Miami, the University of Colorado, and Loyola University Chicago, where he currently serves as Professor of Finance and holds the Frank W. Considine Chair of Applied Ethics. Robert is the author or co-author of more than 50 research articles and 25 finance texts on topics, including financial derivatives, investments, corporate finance, and financial institutions. Robert recently edited the Encyclopedia of Business, Society, and Ethics. He also founded Kolb Publishing, Inc., which published finance and economics university texts and was acquired by Blackwell Publishing, now part of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. To read Robert’s complete biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:59 — 48.1MB)

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StrategyDriven Change Management Forum

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“The number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 18 months.”

Gordon Moore
co-Founder , Intel
Originally published in Electronics Magazine, April 19, 1965

When Gordon Moore made this famous comment, there were approximately 60 devices on an Intel chip. Four decades later, Intel placed 1.7 billion transistors on its Itanium chip; proving Moore’s Law to be fairly accurate.

Only a few things occur with certainty and one of those is change. Technology changes flattened the world and gave us access to individuals living thousands of miles away. And it did so in less than two decades. As business leaders, we no longer compete with local, regional, or domestic providers; we are challenged by rivals from Europe, India, China, and Japan.

Advances in technology altered the social fabric of the workplace too. While cell phones, email, and social networking connect us almost instantaneously from almost anywhere on the planet, medical breakthroughs enable us to live longer, more productive lives; bringing together four generations of employees in our workforce – each with differing values, goals, and needs.

Change is indeed occurring. Leaders who can motivate and inspire their employees to embrace change give their organization a significant competitive advantage. Those who do not place their organization at significant risk of becoming irrelevant.

Focus of the Change Management Forum

Materials contained within the Change Management Forum provide insight to the principles of change management as well as the best practices of those leaders recognized as top performers in this area. Each article is tailored to help readers improve their organization’s change management policies and practices so to achieve superior results and move ahead of the competition.

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Principles

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor Articles

StrategyDriven Podcasts

StrategyDriven Podcast

StrategyDriven Podcast – Special Edition

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