Today’s interview is with Sandy Rogers, the co-author of new book: Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion and the leader of FranklinCovey’s Loyalty Practice. Sandy joins me today to talk about the new book, how leading companies develop loyalty (Spoiler alert: it’s not about a loyalty programmes), what they do to get in the way of loyalty and how they can put themselves on the right path.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – New tech at work and improving the employee experience – How to get it right – Interview with Carrie Duarte – and is number 300 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Sandy:

• Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion was co-authored with Leena Rinne and Shawn Moon.
• So much of the difference between a good and a great experience comes down to how we feel about the people serving us.
• The book advocates for three core loyalty principles: empathy, responsibility and generosity and each comes with a series of specific practices that bring these principles to life.
• This is not a book about reward or points programmes.
• Frequent flyer miles and so on….those things may be helpful but they’re so easily copied by competitors.
• Everybody in the organization, everyone who’s touching customers, has to have a loyalty mindset.
• To make this happen we have to carve out space in our busy days and make it easier for people to do these things more often.
• Empathy is our ability to identify with and understand how somebody else is feeling.
• To do that we’ve got to understand what their hidden story is.
• Two practices help do that: 1. Make a genuine human connection, and 2. Listen to learn their story.
• The Chinese symbol for listen contains the characters for the ears, the eyes and the heart. It takes all three to really understand the deepest need of the human heart, which is to feel understood.
• Responsibility is all about helping people reach their goals and taking ownership for helping them succeed.
• The two practices that help with this are: 1. Discover the real job people are trying to get done, and 2. Follow up to make sure the job was done well.
• Generosity is all about giving more than is expected.
• The two practices that help with this are: 1. Share insights openly to help make it easier for us to get things done, to make things less tedious or to involve less work, and 2. Surprise us in unexpected ways that bring joy.
• To keep things simple and easy to implement, Sandy recommends organising ‘huddles’ (a 10-15 min meeting) at the end of every day to talk about these ideas, share stories and bring them to life.
• There are huddle suggestions at the end of each chapter in the book.
• Loyalty leaders understand that it all begins with your employees.
• Are your employees showing behaviours that produce loyal customers? These will lead to faster business growth and an improved bottom line.
• One US auto repair chain has been running a test of these huddles in 20 of their stores. In a period of six months, they were able to improve their customer service scores by an average of 10 points, whilst 3 of their stores improved their scores by more than 20 points.
• The key to all of this is making space for this to happen. We all live busy lives but by focusing on this and giving it attention we give it life.
• Almost every mission statement talks about the importance of customers right now. But, if we’re not willing to carve out 15 minutes a week to celebrate the people who are doing an incredible job for customers and talk about these principles then we’re not willing to put our money where our mission is.
• Stephen Covey said leadership is a choice is not a position.
• Everybody in the organization not only needs to be a loyalty leader and adopt a loyalty leader mindset but everybody also needs to be put into a position to live these principles more and often.

About Sandy

Sandy Rogers is the co-author of Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion. Sandy Rogers is the leader of FranklinCovey’s Loyalty Practice. He was previously senior vice president at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. During his 14 years there, Sandy managed the turn-around of the London, England operation and led the teams that developed Enterprise’s marketing and fleet services strategies, the advertising campaign “Pick Enterprise…We’ll Pick You Up,” and the system for measuring and improving customer service across all branches.

Before Enterprise, he worked in marketing at Apple Computer, and in brand management at P&G. Sandy has a Bachelor’s degree from Duke and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Grab a copy of Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion , say Hi to Sandy and the folks at FranklinCovey on Twitter @SandyRogersFC and @franklincovey and do connect with Sandy on LinkedIn here.

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Thanks to Pixabay for the image.