Harvard Business Review on Increasing Customer Loyalty

Best Face Forward

by Jeffrey F. Rayport and Bernard J. Jaworski

HOW DO YOU SERVE YOUR customers? Let us count the ways. You serve them through your retail stores, through your Web site, through your catalog and customer service call centers. You serve them through touch points that are human, like clerks and concierges, and you serve them through touch points that are automated, like vending machines and voice response units. If yours is like most companies, it has a broad collection of these interfaces and is investing in even more. But what it probably doesn’t have is an interface system. That is to say, all of those ways you connect and interact with customers don’t add up to an integrated and unique capability to manage relationships.

Unless ...