How Employee Commitment Can Spark Brand Loyalty

Jonathan Ruchman, Senior Director of Customer Experience for Brookdale Senior Living communities, shared an intriguing example of how employee commitment is a crucial link to overall brand loyalty during a four-member panel discussion titled, “Seize the Moment: Making the Most of Every Customer Touchpoint,” on Monday at the inaugural Customer Expo in Nashville.
 
At a Brookdale Senior Living community in Houston, the staff was struggling with a perplexing situation, Ruchman noted. The community uses electronic keypads to unlock the doors in the wing where its Alzheimer’s residents live so they can’t just walk out, but each morning the keypad codes were changed.
 
After several weeks of daily disruption, the maintenance director volunteered to stay up all night and monitor the keypad to see if he could detect what the issue might be. After most of the residents had gone to bed, the answer became clear. One of the Alzheimer’s patients walked out of his room and started punching numbers into the keypad, innocently and inadvertently changing the codes.
 
As it turns out, the patient was a former NASA employee who was in charge of the launch pad codes. Punching numbers into a keypad was second nature to him and something he had done his entire life.
 
To satisfy the resident’s desire to enter codes in keypads, the maintenance director created a fake keypad, put a sticker with the NASA logo on it and attached it to the wall. From that point forward, the resident used the fake NASA keypad and left the one that unlocked the doors alone.
 
Mission accomplished.
 
Ruchman was joined on the panel by Danielle Quatrochi, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience and Innovation for Finish Line; Jamie Russo, Vice President of loyalty programs and customer engagement for Choice Hotels; and Bindi Menon, Vice President of Marketing, Strategy, and Insights for Captain D’s restaurants.
 
The panel covered a wide range of customer loyalty topics, including delivering effective touchpoints, how to design a customer loyalty program, and different ways to approach customer loyalty.
 
One of the key strategies for Choice Hotels is an omnichannel approach, Russo said.
 
“Our customer base goes from Millennials to Baby Boomers and a ton of folks in between, so one approach tends to be a difficult challenge,” Russo said.
 
More importantly, Russo added, is making sure the approach to each of those groups is focused on building relationships first.
 
“It seems like everything is buy now, buy now, buy now,” he explained. “But when someone’s just doing research, it’s like you’re asking them to merge bank accounts on a first date. They’re just trying to figure things out. So we prefer to educate first rather than just sell them. That’s where you can form relationships and really build customer loyalty.”
 
At Finish Line, a premium retailer of athletic shoes, apparel, and accessories, officials are trying to overcome the sell, sell, sell mentality. Their answer is creating in-store experiences that allow sales associates to create conversations and build relationships.
 
“We try to think about what would be meaningful to our different segments,” Quatrochi said. “They all want something different and we can’t just offer discounts because there are regulations around that. So we’ll create special shopping nights for moms and we’ll do something special for kids while mom shops. Or we’ll have a live video feed with celebrities or athletes that our customers can’t gain access to by themselves.”
 
What’s more, Finish Line offers an immersive experience.
 
“We also took a mirror and created an immersive experience where you can try on a pair of shoes and then change the background and superimpose yourself in different environments,” Quatrochi explained. “You can send a picture to yourself or your friends. It’s a conversation starter, but our customers and sales associates like it. I heard someone say in a session earlier today that ‘0the margin is in the memories.’ That’s so true and that’s what we want to create.”
           
The restaurant industry is just entering the customer loyalty arena, according to Menon, so the challenges are many. Captain D’s created a rewards program based on both visitor frequency and money spent but is spending a lot of time entering the digital space—a place most restaurant chains haven’t spent a lot of time.
 
“Before, your customer interaction was in a restaurant, take-out, or drive-through,” she said. “With mobile, you have to be so responsive. Your customers have to be able to place an order in two clicks. Every touchpoint is important now.”
 

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