Customer loyalty: Entrepreneurs should focus on value creation

As more and more of the buying processes and consumer behaviors are rapidly changing, it is increasingly important to consider how brand construction and deployment strategies are also transforming. It is argued that good intentions can be justified, but rather than telling your customers that, show them. This is why young entrepreneurs should focus on connecting big data to business value creation, customer experience harvesting as well as customer value management.

Learning to identify target customers for the greatest value by analyzing business from a customer-centric viewpoint and determining customer lifetime value individually and collectively is key. Additionally, understanding the customer value proposition and analysing the economics of customer loyalty to build a business case is equally important. To secure customer loyalty, a number of technique are applied.

Young entrepreneurs should consider shifting from customer differentiation to customer value. Customer value creation requires a lot of patience, step by step approach starting with analytics so as to have a bigger picture of what matters to customers, key areas focus and sustained customer experience management. One needs structured customer value science methodology to design the roadmap, direct investments and drive the required transformation.

Supporting customer relationship management using customer data is equally important. This is not only crucial for attracting new customers but also for retaining existing ones who may otherwise be attracted to competitors. The data helps in connecting customer behaviour and usage patterns so as to make personalised services decisions and follow up schedules.

Application of loyalty economics cannot be ignored either. Young entrepreneurs should attempt to categorise their customers because some are worth far more than others. Those that act as promoters through loyalty and advocacy. Meticulous loyalty economics can help to estimate profitability of promoters, passives and detractors hence directly or indirectly informing the impact of business actions and initiatives and providing insights to investments and resource allocation.

However, for this happen successfully, young entrepreneurs should familiarize themselves with different approaches to conceptualising and measuring customer loyalty, learn what drives customer loyalty, check history of loyalty programs that have worked and the specifics of their components, features and benefits.

Finally, it is important to explore the place of trigger marketing. Young entrepreneurs should not only see to it that they speak the same language as their customers but must be able to logically calculate triggers of value exactly as they do and using their measurement metrics.