How to win customers' trust and loyalty

“And with the 2010 FIFA World Cup in sight, we need to change these perceptions and myths and start offering world-class services to win customers' trust and loyalty,” Clyde said.

It has been established that the more customers moan and complain, the more a business loses those customers, as they are likely to take their services elsewhere and this means a loss of income and reputation.

More sophisticated

Clyde said that customers' expectations for services have become more sophisticated over the years, and to make a living one has got to be nice to a customer, based on effectiveness, efficiency, relationship and satisfaction.

“Get customers closer, make them an asset meaning part of your company and maximise value we getting from them based on trust to measure for profitability,” he said.

Despite many businesses eternally evangelising the ‘We Are 100% Customer-Centric' philosophy, the 2003 Round Survey of 2017 companies worldwide has proved otherwise, finding that 70% of companies are product-centric, 12% are customer-focus, 3% are customer-value and only 15% are customer-centric.

Inhibiting factors

However, there are always some inhibiting factors as to why customers are not really getting the service they so deserve, Clyde conceded.

• Credit/debit card penetration (one and done transactions better be done on the phone and web
  
• Customer fraud (need for tight procedures, signatures and written documentation)
  
• Internet penetration (only 10.30% in SA, while Australia accounts for 73%, US for 70%, UK 62% and South America 21%)

“Without the net, customers are less empowered,” Clyde said.

• Scarce IT skills (great kit, but how does it work?)
  
• Frontline empowerment (script procedures need consistency)
  
• Emotional intelligence (those that in charge of customer care need a huge dose of emotional intelligence and be people's person
  
• Internal fraud (if we cannot trust our own people to look after our customers, our competitors will look after them for us)

To sum up, Clyde said that to overcome these hurdles, SA companies need to skill up their people with EQ, create a ‘Maltezer' culture and train and retrain scarce technical skills, and tackle crime and education.

For more information on SOCAP, go to www.socap.org.za.