Shawn Moon of Franklin Covey Talks “Fierce Loyalty”

Customer Expo 2018 featured a general session hosted by Shawn Moon, Executive Vice President of Strategic Markets for Franklin Covey. Moon’s presentation touched on many of the topics covered in the book he co-authored, Fierce Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion. His talk offered many insights relevant to anyone working in the loyalty field.
 
Moon began by recalling a personal anecdote in which he visited a company’s board room. While there, he studied a framed copy of the business’s mission, vision, and values. When members of the company returned from a morning break, Moon asked them to state what was written on the copy without looking. No one could, and no one could recall the gist of the values, either. 
 
He asked, “What is the point of having that if you don’t have those behaviors, those values, those aspirations in both the mind and the heart of your people, demonstrated every single day?”  Moon didn’t think mission statements were some gratuitous nicety.
 
He went on to discuss the importance of mission and values at his company, which “enables greatness in people and organizations everywhere.” He stated that any Franklin Covey employee could recite that mantra if quizzed about it.
 
Personal experience, in Moon’s view, plays a substantive role in cultivating customer loyalty. He offered stories of employees going the extra mile to please customers. He asked the audience if they had experiences that made them feel loyal. One woman offered an instance in which the head baker at a grocery store came in to remake a cake that had been damaged. She admitted that she has since told that story to many people and remains loyal to that grocery.
 
Moon remarked that, “I’ve had the chance to talk to people all over the world and talk about organizations they admire. You know what I found, in cases like this? It’s usually not a great big thing. Sometimes it’s just a very simple gesture that someone on the frontline does.” He indicated that customers become loyal to brands that have made them feel a certain way. Grandiose, expensive programs are not as effective as small but meaningful gestures.
 
He emphasized the employee frontline, saying, “More than 70 percent of what makes a customer experience great is driven by the behaviors of your frontline people.” He further stressed the importance of frontline employee behaviors, when he recalled a conversation he had with a leader of a major toy retailer. That businessman had said he had 25,000 employees and felt it impossible to encourage them to have good interactions with customers. “We kind of all know what happened with that organization,” said Moon.
 

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