Beyond Transactions: How to Build Sustainable Customer Loyalty

While attracting new customers is often prioritised, many overlook customer loyalty's critical role. Notably, more than two-thirds of customer loyalty is driven by the experience. This is more than brand and price combined.

This highlights a key insight: customer loyalty is predominately influenced by the customer experience. This means you need to invest in and prioritise customer experience strategies to build and maintain a loyal customer base.

But what does that look like?

The Lumery recently worked with a large Australian retail conglomerate on the launch of their newest, multi-faceted membership program. This complex project had data passing through multiple systems to allow for event-based, real-time and personalised communications to help drive advocacy amongst their customers.  

We won't lie, getting to this point requires a lot more dedication to uncovering consumer insights, conducting in-depth assessments, and refining your strategies based on what truly drives your customers.

Unlocking CX Potential: The Lumery's Approach to Customer Research  

Are you looking to enhance your customer research efforts? While many businesses have foundational practices like feedback forms, social media monitoring, and occasional surveys, The Lumery (TL) brings a unique perspective to consumer research.

Standard Practices vs. TL's Approach:

While most businesses rely on conventional methods, we offer a more in-depth approach to customer research to drive CX assessment and experimentation. We explore critical questions, such as:

• Does your feedback loop result in tangible improvements?
• How agile is your response to evolving customer demands?
• Are you asking the right questions in the right way to extract meaningful insights?
• Is your brand genuinely customer-centric and continuously experimenting to improve in real time?
• Do you base your decisions on customer insights?

We go beyond traditional insights. Our approach combines focus groups and surveys to identify capability gaps, facilitate experimentation, and provide actionable guidance to leaders and teams.

Why is this important?  

Through our experience, we've uncovered a common theme. Many brands assume they understand their customers' wants and the reasons behind their decisions. They may even venture into research with preconceived notions of what they'll find. Sometimes they are correct, but often they are not or misunderstand the underlying "why" behind customer decisions. This highlights the immense value of customer research, as it allows us to move beyond assumptions based on personal observations and biases.

You might now be wondering how to apply these insights in practice. Whether you're just beginning your journey to build sustainable customer loyalty, or your current strategy isn't yielding the desired results, a few key elements should be addressed.  

Navigating Your Own Customer Loyalty Journey: Where to Start?

Align customer needs with business objectives  

This is essential for long-term success. When customer and business objective goals are in sync, it creates a win-win situation for both the customer and your business. Customers will receive a product or service that meets their requirements, while the business builds customer loyalty, drives revenue, and increases brand reputation.   ‍

Map out your customer journey  

From the initial touchpoint to post-purchase support, every touchpoint must be considered to ensure optimal customer experience. By creating personalised interactions at every stage, your businesses can create a positive and lasting experience that drives loyalty and encourages customers to advocate for their product or service. This can lead to increased customer retention, positive referrals, and business growth.  

In an ideal scenario, turning customers into loyal customers would be straightforward; the customer has a need that your business fulfils, they buy it, they use it, they like it, they buy it again (and again). However, this process is more complex, and the customer journey is filled with stops and starts, issues and opportunities. Businesses must often continually persuade customers to choose and stay with their products over their competitors. It’s important to continuously revisit your customer journey, and identify the touchpoints, challenges, and opportunities throughout to determine where you may need to make improvements to your customer experience.   ‍

Develop a robust loyalty program

Loyalty programs are pivotal in solidifying the customer relationship by providing rewards and incentives for ongoing support to your business, product, or service.  

69% of consumers are influenced by loyalty programs, incentives or rewards. Consider three supermarkets in the same vicinity of each other, you will shop in the supermarket where you earn cash back or points, and continue to shop there, over the other two. You select the supermarket with the biggest benefit to you.  

Loyalty programs also help increase basket size and value. Up to 66% of customers modify their spending to maximise reward redemption.  

Get practical feedback on your CX capabilities  

Are you at the beginning of your customer loyalty journey? Or is your current strategy not providing tangible results? The Lumery has a capability assessment tool that covers the key CX aspects including strategy, people, process, technology, data and the customer experience domain.  

In the end, customers are more complex than meets the eye, and we’re passionate about uncovering these complexities through hypotheses, rather than assumptions.  

Get in touch with The Lumery and our team can assess your organisation's current maturity levels in delivering seamless, connected and relevant customer experiences, and identify any gaps that might require attention.