Building Client Loyalty

I found this article on the MarketingProfs.com website (if you aren't subscribing to the e-mail updates, you really should) titled, "12 Laws of Customer Loyalty" by Jill Griffin. Her 12 tips:

Build staff loyalty
Practice the 80/20 rule
Know your loyalty stages and ensure that your customers are moving through them
Serve first, sell second
Aggressively seek out customer complaints
Stay responsive
Know your customer's definition of value
Win back lost customers
Use multiple channels to serve the same customers well
Give your frontline the skills to perform
Collaborate with your channel partners
Store your data in a centralized database

My favorite gem from the article:

Today’s customers are smarter, better informed and more intolerant of “being sold” than ever before. They expect doing business with you to be as hassle-free and gratifying for them as possible. When they experience good service elsewhere, they bring a if-they-can-do-it-why-can’t–you attitude to their next transaction with you. They believe that you earn their business with service that is pleasant, productive and personalized; and if you don’t deliver, they’ll leave.

As service providers, lawyers are not just competing against other lawyers, but airlines, dry cleaners, restaurants, and even internet retailers. When clients have gotten a high level of service from someone else, we need to match (or even exceed) that level of service, or we fail. That is one of the reasons I've been writing this blog. I want to look to see what others in business are doing to improve the customer experience and bring those lessons to my firm and lawyers in general.