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These days, when I look around my house, I see more things made in other countries than ever before. Being a true lover of diversity and an adventurer at heart, balanced with loyalty to my country, I want to see the United States of America have the highest quality inventions, services and products on the market. It often surprises me, when I see such a lack of customer focus in the States. After all, aren't all the businesses in America founded on a government for the people by the people?

As a Six Sigma professional, there are many paths, (Six Sigma Lean, Six Sigma Improve, and Six Sigma Design) that can assist in defining the voice of the customer. Most companies do not want to spend the time executing all of the Six Sigma Design tools. As this is a very data intensive endeavor, what we need to realize is that Six Sigma is scalable to your business needs.

Below I've listed 10 scalable ways to increase customer loyalty:

1. Define clear customer segmentation e.g. who do we want to attract and retain?

2. Determine key customer expectations from that target group

3. Understand why people go to our competitors' e.g. immediate/ free delivery?

4. Effectively match your product/service demand with your customer channel e.g. if you're a call center offer a voice response for product status checks

5. Conduct a top-down analysis of your current people, processes and tools to see how capable you are to meet your targeted customer needs

6. Acquire or build the organizational infrastructure (people, processes and tools) to meet or exceed the customers demand

7. Define/align on internal Service Level Agreements (SLA) and measures to meet or exceed customer expectations

8. Establish clear control points via effective and holistic measurement system(s) and dashboards so that the voice of the customer, voice of the employee, cycle-time and financial goals are continually analyzed and put into action.

9. Create strong feedback loops- for each actor involved in the process. For example, the sales department needs a direct communication channel with Research & Development to advise them of customer's wants/needs. Customer service needs to understand key selling points to save a sale.

10. Build/reinforce consequences and rewards and consequences to meet or exceed your goals and objectives

Regardless of the type of customer loyalty path that is chosen, here is my take on 5 types of customers not to lose:

1. Customers who purchase additional items that are not your typical core product/service e.g. gift certificates

2. Customers who refer friends/family

3. Customers who consistently pay on time/tip 20% or more

4. Customers who spend over the average amount of your typical product/service

5. Repeat customers who have purchased your product/services for a significant amount of time.

If your company, cannot afford to build or enhance a loyalty intelligence system to tip off your employees on how to customize products or services for your customer; consider the following. Provide your customers with unique identifiers that can easily be looked up by your staff. For example, what are some of your customer's special occasions; what are some of their family/friends names; what do they typically order; what are their hobbies; what they do they do for a living? After all, people are loyal to businesses that treat them well; and businesses they can trust.

Nina Segura B.S., M.A., CSSBB
Metaspire Consulting - "Performance improvement from strategy to execution."
Web: http://www.metaspireconsulting.com/
Our Whitepapers: http://www.metaspireconsulting.com/white_papers

"I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences." Margaret J. Wheatley

By Nina Segura
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