Customer Loyalty By The Numbers

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Last Tuesday, I wrote the Trials of the Customer Loyalty Specialist. This was a fairly light post about the difficult job of a Customer Loyalty Specialist where I said that you need to determine how the leadership of the company defines customer loyalty. It’s likely that, no matter what platitudes they give about “superior customer service”, they have revenue as the ultimate benchmark for success. That’s what they get paid to measure.

Good friend and former colleague, Mike Frichol, has been writing a series of posts in his blog about calculating Lifetime Customer Value. In simplest terms, this is the value of the customer to the company in monetary terms over the lifetime of the company’s relationship with that customer.

If you find yourself in a position of Customer Loyalty Specialist, Lifetime Customer Value is a calculation you will want to get familiar with. LCV helps define the value of customer loyalty and, therefore, the value of the Customer Loyalty Specialist. The last thing you want to be in right now is a position where the value can’t be defined. If you can define the value of your role in hard dollars, all the better.

It will also give you a concrete estimate of the value of customer loyalty that you can use with the executives to gain their commitment. As I pointed out yesterday, sometimes tough decisions need to be made. Taking a look at these decisions and their impact on customer loyalty in dollar terms can help you build your case.

If Lifetime Customer Value is something you are interested in learning more about, I encourage you to read Mike’s blog The Marketing Melange. But, fair warning, Mike goes pretty deep into the matter and it’s going to take more brain cells than your average post. That said, I reported to Mike for several years when he and I worked together at Microsoft. I encourage you to ask questions. He is a great teacher.

Melissa