While there is unanimity when pointing to loyalty as the key to the future of a company, reality says that the repeatability index (not the loyalty rate, which is much lower) does not reach 70%, which It should make us stop and reflect on what we are doing wrong.
A few years ago, a well-known and pioneering credit card calculated that it costs five times more to get a new client than to maintain an existing one, which led to the development, and still in progress, of multiple techniques - point programs, loyalty cards, CRM… -, with the aim of getting loyal customers, but it is not working.
We are doing things very different from what we did, we are doing customer-focused management, something unthinkable not long ago, but we are not getting the results we expected. What happen?
We already know that in the business world it is difficult to find a single cause behind an effect, but in this case, identifying loyalty with techniques is being a big mistake.
We still continue to see the customer as the entity to which we must place our product. We believe that because we are now talking more about the client and using different instruments than before, we have made the big change, but this is not the case. The big change is attitudinal, not instrumental.
Today, still, what we do, we continue doing from us and thinking about us. This is the reason why fidelity continues to be a pending issue.
The client is not a part of the game, but is the essence of the game. Everything revolves around him, so our business should be his business, his profit, ours, his concerns, ours, his dreams, his concerns, his… ours. Immediately this stalls in our hearts, our management will begin to be directed towards the client.
Thus, customer-focused management, as it is today, leads us to be politically correct, while a policy directed towards the customer leads us to be emotional impactors. A management focused on the client makes us impeccable in the objective, while a policy directed towards the client makes us be seducers in the subtle.
Customer-centric management is to be with him, while a policy directed towards the customer is to be with him. As in so many things, the nuance is the determining factor.
We are, therefore, before a management of people's feelings, which means that the technical, even though it is becoming more important every day, comes to occupy a discreet background and the emotional becomes the core. What problem is derived from this change? A very important one.
Managing emotions can only be done by the professional and this type of professional, the true protagonist of the new management, does not exist in our companies and not because it does not have an emotional coefficient sufficiently developed, but simply because there is no policy that encourages this management.
Conclusion, loyalty and transactional policy are incompatible. Loyalty from a transactional policy is very complicated, if not impossible. Loyalty is making the client feel that what he receives from us always exceeds what he expected to receive and for this feeling to occur, the 'sine qua non' condition is that there is a relationship of trust, which is impossible if in the company There is no policy that 'creates' this type of professionals capable of establishing solid links and, of course, a policy, such as transactional, that only seeks recruitment, is not at all.
It must be a policy that, even valuing a high IQ - since it determines what the professional knows - seeks to develop the emotional coefficient - since it is what determines what that professional will do. A policy that, while valuing that a high IQ allows to effectively carry out the demands of the position, gives priority to the emotional coefficient, because it is the one that makes that realization successful. Therefore, implementing the relational policy, based on developing emotional intelligence in its professionals, is the challenge.
