Customer loyalty programs: How brands can create a virtuous circle
What makes customer loyalty programs succeed? Create experiences that delight customers by speaking to their heart, soul, and head.
Customer trust is earned, and not through passive means. Ask any rom-com, breakup song, or digital marketing publication to name the #1 key to a good relationship, and you’ll get the same answer: trust. For brands, building customer trust promises to be a holy grail of long-term revenue and loyalty. But consumer skepticism and the abundance of options make it feel elusive. What is customer trust, really? And how do you go about building customer trust?
Customer trust is trust. At its core, it’s no different from the trust you put in your personal relationships, your employer, or your go-to news publication. It’s the trust a customer puts in a business. Building customer trust is like any trust, you earn it and you have to work to protect it.
The real question is: what is trust?
Trust is belief in someone or something – belief that they will do what they say they will. According to one definition (yeah, let’s be those people), “If you trust someone, you believe that they are honest and sincere and will not deliberately do anything to harm you.”
The belief that companies will do what they say they will and that they won’t deliberately harm consumers.
Building customer trust, then, is walking the walk, talking the talk, and respecting that people are paying attention.
Two other tenets of trust are crucial to understanding its role in relationships, business or otherwise:
What makes customer loyalty programs succeed? Create experiences that delight customers by speaking to their heart, soul, and head.
Between technological advances like machine learning and artificial intelligence, and the proliferation of customer data, consumers today are putting more on the line than money: They’re sharing their personal data. What’s at stake – quite literally – are their identities.
In our increasingly data-driven world, that could have serious and far-reaching implications.
Customers are willing to share their data in exchange for better, more personalized customer experiences, and those experiences could translate to $87.5 billion in sales. But they will stop doing business with you entirely if you misuse or share that data without their consent.
In short: to compete, you need to deliver outstanding experiences. To do that, you need valuable customer data. And to get that, customers need to trust you.
Of course, businesses can proactively work on building (or re-building) customer trust and being trustworthy.
Here are five examples of how to build trust in personal relationships, adapted for brands:
With the following unified customer profile checklist, you can find insights to improve your overall customer data strategy. Explore how your current customer data strategy and customer profiles compare to what a CDP can do.
As business becomes more and more human every day, the nature of how we work is becoming more reliant on customer trust and emotional intelligence.
Establishing and maintaining customer trust is a long game. You can make a quick buck by taking advantage of customers’ trust, but you won’t earn repeat business (and the fallout could destroy your reputation).
And chances are, if you’re reading an article like this, you’re more interested in the long-term benefits than a short-term gain.
To succeed long-term, brands need to operate with empathy for their customers. That means not only getting to know them but respecting them and nurturing the relationship. Because business is personal.