Creating Customer Loyalty Mon 11 Dec 06

I recently had the pleasure of hearing J. Downey Bridgwater speak at the Houston Planning Forum.  Mr. Bridgwater is Chairman, President & CEO of Sterling Banchares, a Texas bank focused on serving owner-operated businesses.  A number of things that Mr. Bridgwater talked about apply equally to banking and to IT.

In thinking carefully about building customer loyalty the executives at Sterling Bank came up with 3 key elements that they needed to focus on. (Hmmm - focusing your key action items in to 3 key items for clarity sounds familiar).  These 3 items are:

• No Defects - it has to be right after all they are dealing with your money
• Timeliness - they have to execute quickly and be responsive to your needs
• Caring - they have to care about you and your business

These 3 actions lead to customer satisfaction and repeated satisfaction leads to customer loyalty.   We in IT can apply these same 3 tenets to our work and can build our customer loyalty too.  When you think about it our customer want the same thing.  They want defect free service provided quickly and responsively and they want us to be care about what they are trying to accomplish.

Mr. Bridgwater pointed out the need for a proper balance between sufficiency in meeting the customer's needs and efficiency of operations needed to satisfy the shareholders.  This is always a fine line to walk.  The Sterling Bank approach is to first determine what needs to be done to meet the customer requirement and then determine how to do it efficiently.

This can be an important lesson for IT.  Often we in IT tend to do this in reverse.  First we determine the most efficient way for IT to operate then we try to make our customers deal with us in this manner which not surprisingly often leads to customer frustration.  There is a subtle distinction between these two approaches and it is in the area of bias towards the customer.  Personally, I favor the Sterling Bank approach.

Isn't it amazing what we can learn by seeing how other service providers operate?

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Why It's Time to Lose the Snide IT Attitude
• Or the posts in the "Customer Service" category