Re-reach out and touch someone

The looming wireless number portability deadline has pushed the issue of customer loyalty to the top of the industry’s collective mind. Everyone is talking about the best ways to maintain customers—wireless and wireline—whether by locking them in with specific high-end services, guaranteeing service quality or improving the overall customer experience. Scott Robinette, the president of Hallmark Loyalty, believes customer loyalty is an emotional issue.  

Robinette oversees a division of Hallmark Cards that tries to help all kinds of companies create emotional connections between their brands and their customers using a concept called “Emotion Marketing.” (The moniker also happens to be the title of a 2001 book Robinette co-authored with Hallmark Keepsakes executive Claire Brand and business consultant Vicki Lenz.) He says telecom service providers aren’t doing nearly enough to create the kind of emotional bonds that would engender loyalty and stem customer exodus. In a recent survey commissioned by Hallmark Loyalty, telecom companies got the lowest ratings (after retail companies and financial services companies). When asked what kind of job telecom companies do to show customers that they care, 67% of respondents answered either “fair” or “poor.”  

In telecom, Robinette says, carriers have neglected the opportunity to foster the inherent bond that should exist with customers—a bond based on the fact that a customers’ phone service (again, both wireless and wireline) is a lifeline.

“When it doesn’t work, it’s your worse nightmare,” Robinette says. The telecom industry’s past marketing behaviors (including the long-distance carriers’ $50-to-switch tactics), service quality issues and monopoly perceptions about the telecom industry haven’t helped either, he says.

Whether the competitive telecom environment will embrace these concepts remains to be seen. Today’s carriers tend to sell the cost, availability and capability of their services more than they try to build emotional attachments with their customers—although some have tried of late by reminding people of their long legacy of providing telephone service. Robinette believes it will be big customer defections that make carriers start pouring on the emotion—and that the first ones to try it will be happy they did.

“No one has institutionalized this approach yet,” Robinette says. “The first one that does will win in a big way.”

E-mail me at jmeyers@primediabusiness.com.