Appendix: The Twelve Laws of Loyalty

(EN: The author ends with a "quick-reference" to the topic - much of this looks like a rehash, but some of it seems to be new, or stated a bit differently than it was in the previous material.)

1. Build Staff Loyalty - Companies that have loyal customers also tend to have loyal employees; companies that can't keep an employee long-term generally cannot keep a customer either. This is not merely a coincidence - there are causal connections.
2. Remember the Pareto principle: 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. Seek to identify this core of loyal and valuable customers and serve them well, even at the expense of the other 80% who contribute little value, no value, or even negative value.
3. Move customers through the loyalty stages. Recognizing that the greatest profit comes from your most loyal customers, manage and direct the activities that will create loyalty, and profitability will follow.
4. Service rather than sales. Today's customers are more savvy and less easily manipulated - and moreover, they are quick to recognize attempts to "sell" them and react negatively. However, customers value, and give their business to firms that help them to accomplish their own goals.
5. Seek out complaints. Customers know what they want from your business, and what they're not getting, better that industry "experts" - get them to tell you how to be better, and act quickly and decisively.
6. Be responsive. In the competitive environment, a business must available when and where customers want them, and act without delay. This is a critical component of customer service, and is increasingly expected.
7. Take the customer perspective. Another change in the competitive environment is that companies no longer get to teach customers why their product is good - but instead must find out what the customer expects of a product or service, and satisfy their expectations.
8. Chase lost customers. Customers don't "come crawling back" to a supplier, as competitors are happy to take them in. Unless you act aggressively, they may not even come walking back, or be aware that they should consider returning.
9. Use multiple channels. Just as customers expect companies to be there when needed (responsiveness), they also expect companies to serve them through their own channel of preference. Especially in Internet and mobile, the competition is just a click away.
10. Empower the front line. Employees who are responsible for serving customers, or who interface with customers at all, should have the resources, authority, and training to be able to do so effectively and promptly.
11. Collaborate with channel partners. No company stands as alone, but depends on its own suppliers and downstream vendors to deliver value to the customer. Sharing information and working cooperatively with the other firms on whom you depend enables you to provide better value, with greater ease.
12. Centralize customer information. Customer service depends on knowing the customer's every interaction with the company - and if information is fractured in various departments' data systems, each inaccessible to the other, the firm is greatly handicapped in serving the customer.