Customer loyalty a thing of the past

Customer loyalty a thing of the past
The Financial Express, November 27, 2009, Page 12

fe Bureaus, Thiruvananthapuram

Customer loyalty is dead, long live cluster loyalty! This was the conclusion arrived at during UST Global’s Retail Razzmatazz. It has also been seen that clients are no longer faithful to particular brand because of a loyalty incentive, since other brands of similar products or services may offer same services too.

An airline’s loyalty scores or a bank’s fancy credit card add-ons, to cite examples, tempt the client to keep returning to the same brand only when they are the only ones offering this kind of an incentive. “Research has shown that customer loyalty is dead”, says Harish Bijjor, brand expert and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, Bangalore, while speaking at the UST Global’s Retail Razzmatazz in Thiruvananthapuram, which had customer loyalty as its theme.

Bijoor also argued that there could be a new trend called `cluster loyalty’, where the client is faithful to a select cluster of brands, which offer him the best experience. An airlines multiple interfaces with a client from one airport to the next could perhaps be an outsourced portion of the service that could cause the airline brand to fall off the client’s favoured cluster.

UST Global, a leading provider of end-to-end IT services and solutions for the Global 1000 market, held second annual Retail Razzmatazz with a week of concurrent events. According to Arun Narayanan, COO, UST Global, Retail Week provides a robust platform for discussion and learning, on both strategic and tactical levels. The theme being customer loyalty, the event presented a comprehensive view of the 2010 consumer who shops, spends, and thinks differently than in the past.

Marsha Blakeslee, GM, Industry Practices, UST Global spoke on the opportunities before social media to enhance customer loyalty in retail and the opportunities for IT players like UST in emerging markets like India. Arun Gupta, Group CIO, Shoppers Stop, said, “IT should demystify itself and become more ubiquitous to make its presence felt to the customer. It should seep unassumingly into the daily lives of people to ensure its longevity.”