We asked Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO, about his top 5 tips for building customer loyalty. Here's what he had to say along with a few examples: 1. One Experience Does Not Fit All: The first tenet of customer loyalty is about serving customers according to their preferences. Different customer segments tend to have strong interaction preferences - choosing, for instance, to speak to a live agent or to log on to their account via mobile browser to check account balance. Similarly, by analyzing customers’ past interactions, you can tailor the customer experience, as well as avoid potential points of frustration or annoyance, such as marketing products that they already own. The caveat: To truly know thy customer requires a holistic, cross-channel perspective. For example, one financial services provider found small business customers were much more likely to utilize self-service options whenever possible and only speak with a live agent when absolutely necessary. 2. Treat New Customers With Kid Gloves: You can only make a first impression once. Start the relationship on a bang by exceeding their expectations, not by asking them to jump through hoops. When was the last time you’ve walked a mile in your customers’ shoes? Case in point: A financial services company found that new customers didn’t have enough time to enter their newly opened account number after being prompted. Increasing the window of time drastically boosted the percentage of successful interactions as well as the likelihood customers would continue to utilize self-service in the future. By looking through the lens of the customer and tracking when and why they interact with your company, you can find opportunities to streamline processes to make it easier for customers to quickly get past the learning curve and kick off the relationship on a high note. 3. Don’t Wait, Anticipate: Related to the first tip, this means capturing the right customer data to anticipate the needs of individual customers or customer segments. Again, this requires a sophisticated cross-channel understanding of your customers in order to make it quick and easy for them to do business with you. For example, a leading telecom company determined that about a third of customers making a payment via IVR followed that interaction by checking their account balance using their mobile device. Proactively sending their new, updated account balance via SMS Text / Email would have delighted customers while at the same time eliminating an additional contact. Similarly, if you know that certain customers always prefer a certain interaction channel for certain interactions, offer it as a default option. 4. Be Wary of Channel-Specific Metrics: Good internal metrics don’t necessarily mean that it’s good for customers or the business as a whole. Look at the big picture to truly understand the overall impact of operations, processes, and policies. For one telecom company, customer satisfaction with the automated IVR dropped, resulting in the incorrect assumption that the application had gone “out of tune.” However, after linking the Customer Satisfaction scores with the interactions, the company quickly learned that the drop in customer satisfaction was in fact due to higher service restoration times for customers with outages and had nothing to do with the IVR. 5. Strive For “First Experience Resolution”: In the contact center, we know that “first contact resolution” is a key metric. But how well are you doing across all of your channels? A customer might try to resolve an issue or complete a transaction by first logging on to their account from their computer or BlackBerry, before later calling into your contact center to speak with a live agent. How do individual customers navigate through your service delivery system? Where are the gaps in your customer experience? A leading telecom company found that customers were searching in vain for product support help online before eventually abandoning their search and picking up the phone to speak with a live agent. By focusing on quick issue resolutions and constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to simplify and streamline customer-facing processes you’ll go a long way to winning over the hearts and minds of your customers.