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06002 Customer Loyalty: Mind and Body, Heart and Soul

Volumes have been written about the concept of customer loyalty and how essential it is to a company’s profitability and growth. There’s no denying that when a company has loyal customers who keep coming back year after year to buy its product and recommend it to others, then that company sells more products at lower cost than it otherwise would. In other words, they get more revenue at a higher profit.

A whole lot has also been written about how to build customer loyalty. These stories cover companies that advocate vastly different ways of creating loyal customers. Many of them talk about providing stellar customer service. Still others say that you need to create a product that delights customers and is such high quality that it needs no service. Others say you need a product that sells itself through word of mouth. Others swear by organizing their entire company structure around customer facing processes. Some companies rely on events like parties or sponsored sports and games.

None of these ideas is a bad one. But it strikes me that with all the companies out there with dramatically different products, some complex and some simple, some intangible and some very concrete, that there’s such a variety between organizations that not every company can win with service, or product quality, or what-have-you, as its key ingredient for customer loyalty.

Instead, each company is called upon to understand the hand it has been dealt in terms of product complexity, quality, ease of use, and type of customer. Customer loyalty through business-to-business channel sales will be very different from loyalty direct from consumers.

I believe that each company must craft its own slightly customized, perhaps even quirky, recipe for creating customer loyalty. And that recipe consists of a mix of four ingredients: mind & body, heart & soul.

Read on below for some ideas on how to connect with your customers on the level of mind, body, heart, and soul.

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06001 The Interpreter: Transforming Input Into Requirements

This is the 100th issue of Product Management Challenges. When I began writing this newsletter a little over three years ago, it was my hope to build up an unmatched source of real-world tips and guidance about software Product Management. I am pleased to say that the many back issues have covered a multitutde of topics which are important, essential even, to the successful Product Management of software.

For this milestone 100th issue, I have chosen a topic that gets right to the core of how a software Product Manager makes a difference. That would be Requirements. Requirements loom large in the life of any Product Manager, and it seems like they are always a challenge. And what I have discovered is that the best requirements seem to be derived, seem to be an indirect result of all the direct input a Product Manager receives. Read on for a closer look at this idea.

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