Lead with Loyalty

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The Interview with Sandy Rogers:

• During Sandy’s tenure at Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the company focused on improving customer service to drive loyalty. They measured service quality and strove to improve from the bottom up. Over ten years, the company’s customer satisfaction rating grew from 67% to 80%, service quality became more consistent between all branches, and sales tripled. The employees may have stayed the same, but changes in management and expectation directly lead to the improvement.
• The biggest factor in customer loyalty is empathy. Loyalty is an emotion that can’t always be explained by numbers and figures. Companies need to remember to include the human element when dealing with their customers if they hope to win their hearts, which is the key to winning their business.
• Empathy and emotional engagement begin inside the company within the employee experience. Companies must respect and empathize with their employees if they want and expect their employees to do the same with their customers. What is felt on the inside of an organization will be felt on the outside.
• Implement a regular “loyalty huddle” with your team. Use this time to focus on one of the principles of loyalty outlined in the book, such as empathy, responsibility, or generosity. Celebrate successes and create a safe space to discuss things that aren’t working and ideas for improvement.
• Empower your employees to come up with ideas for improvement and to deliver the best level of customer service they can, even if that means deviating from established policies. It falls to management to lead this charge and advocate for change. Allow good ideas to come from every level of employee, from frontline representative to CEO.
• Loyalty programs and rewards points may help with customer loyalty, but they’re too easy for competitors to copy. At the end of the day, loyalty will be more driven by empathy and customers’ emotional engagement with a company.
• There will always be people who will try to cheat the system and take advantage of you. You can’t let those few dictate your business practices, because you will alienate the rest of your customers and lose their loyalty by being difficult to work with. This will only end up hurting your company in the end.
• As a leader, you must choose to center your company’s culture around the principles of loyalty. Reward and demonstrate the practices you value as central to your goal. You will start to see positive changes not only in your business but also in your personal life.

Quotes:

“Empathy doesn’t come from scripts. It comes from designing an environment that allows it.” – Sandy Rogers

“We must start by earning the fierce loyalty of our employees by treating them with empathy, responsibility, and generosity.” – Sandy Rogers

“Leadership is a choice. You need to choose to be a loyalty leader.” – Sandy Rogers

About:

Sandy Rogers is the co-author of Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion and the leader of FranklinCovey’s Loyalty Practice. Formerly, Sandy was the senior vice president at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and your host of Amazing Business Radio.

This episode of Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken answers the following questions … and more:

1. How can I create customer loyalty?
2. What drives customer loyalty?
3. How is the employee experience related to the customer experience?
4. How do I change my company’s culture?
5. How important is empathy in creating loyalty?