Customer Loyalty is not equal with prizes or gifts

The clock is ticking as I prepare for a product launch, thousands task pop up in my head, and one of those task is customer loyalty mechanism for the product-to be.

I look to my own personal experience to find the best loyalty mechanism, and I didn’t find something that is Ultra Amazing, what I found is something very basic yet we often forget. Allow me to explain it with a story

I recently was given an upgrade on my Credit Card, before I was just a common customer in the eyes of my bank, until that one fine day I received a package, a thick envelope, when I open that package I realized that my Credit Card has been upgraded, and I notice the phone number to activate my new card is different from the number I used to call, so I call that new number to activate my card, and I was shocked to find that, there’s no IVR, no machine answer me, a real life person answered the call, and how the customer service handled my request was amazingly fast and humane. 

Another experience comes from the banking sector, I have several thousand dollar of idle money that I want to deposit in Bank “X”, bank “X” have a branch nearby my house but instead of making the deposit at that Bank, I make the deposit  on the same Bank “X” but on a different branch, a branch that is 1,5 hours away from my house, why I make such silly decision !, it’s only because,  The bank customer service and teller, calls me by name, from the time I walk in to their doors, if they’re not busy, they’ll stand up and greet me “Good Day Pak Sander, anything we can do for you ? “ I’m not a Priority Banking customer and they greet me like I’m somebody important, that simple service touches me, I felt like a human being not just some random customer, that simple greeting won my heart and my money.

I learn 3 simple points for my product loyalty scheme

1.       If you use prizes for your loyalty scheme, you’ll catch bounty hunters that moves between products – you’ll catch bunny-hoping customer not loyal customer.

2.       Make the customer buying experience pleasant !, it’s doesn’t need to be luxurious.  e.g :  a simple digital queuing number that you can take from your home before going to the doctor will make doctor queuing much more pleasant

3.       Small stuff matters wins customer heart !, a smile, call me by my name, stand up when I approach you, give me  a glass of water, show customer that you really want to connect !

Show your customer that you "put a lot of effort" in maintaining your relationship with your customer, "buying" stuff for your customer is not "putting an effort" to maintain your customer relationship, it's bribing ! ,Bribes will work in the short run, but in the long run you'll find them moving to the next guy that offers more cooler prizes 

So what kind of loyalty scheme that I’ll be implementing to the product, the answer is absolutely “not prizes” but something that’s more personalize to each customer, can’t say what it is at the moment, but I do can tell you, it’s something that we “put an effort” not what we “buy” and I’m sure our customer can see that it comes from our heart.