Customer loyalty is primarily responsible for productivity and growth of a business and most businesses have now grasped this fact and are providing sales training to promote better service and a customer focused approach in all departments. Indeed, in recent research 98% of those businesses questioned named the implementation of customer orientation at all levels of the business as their most important goal. And 90% of the survey respondents confirmed that customer service will be decisive for their future success in sales!

But what do such businesses mean when the talk about “customer orientation” and “service considerations”?

Whereas almost all of the survey participants could agree with key phrases such as “customer satisfaction takes the first place” and “service and complaints management merit a high ranking”, only, for instance, three quarters of those surveyed associated the term “contribution of the customer to product development inside the company” as a part of customer orientation.

Indeed, only two thirds of the businesses surveyed tried to direct the internal business processes entirely by reference to the needs of the customer.

The measures the businesses surveyed plan to use to get rid of gaps in customer orientation are shown in Table 1. The question asked was “What measures are you taking to optimise customer orientation?” and in the survey multiple answers were permitted to this question.

Table 1 Measures for optimising customer orientation
88% Increased (more intense) sales training of all employees concerned
56% Information from the business management communicated to the employees
38% Achieving ISO certification of the most important sales processes
34% Expansion of the service and guarantee obligations
18% Practice of total quality management principles
18% Working with sales benchmarks
6% Other (unspecified) measures

Whether supplier’s efforts actually lead to the customer being satisfied with their supplier or whether the customer is just waiting for the opportunity to change suppliers remains hidden for the majority of businesses. Indeed, no more than 43% of the businesses in the survey measured this.

The most curious about what the customer thinks of their efforts are businesses in the investment goods industry, with 52% of mentions. The remaining businesses in the survey will have to continue to speculate about whether what they are doing is right or wrong.

The following responses were given to the survey questions “what measures are you implementing to promote customer loyalty” and “what significance do these individual measures have for you?” Again, multiple answers were allowed and significance is reported as the mean value of the chosen significance on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 = very important, 4 = unimportant.
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Implemented measures Significance
84% Mail shots 1.8
77% Company surveillance 1.8
69% Discount and or bonus systems 1.8
63% Regular written customer information 1.6
59% Customer training seminars 1.6
54% Telemarketing 1.9
48% Workshops for customers 1.7
46% Incentive schemes 2.7
36% Customer magazine (closed media concept) 2.2
28% Cross-selling 2.4
27% Incentive trips 2.3
25% Train the trainer 2.2
19% Customer clubs 2.5
16% Founder customer groups 2.6
9% Customer cards 2.8


The classic methods of promoting customer loyalty still the most popular and include mailshots, company surveillance, discount / bonus systems. Indeed, mailshots are being implemented by 84% of all the businesses questioned as a means of promoting customer loyalty. Respondents also saw the significance of mailshots as a tool for promoting customer loyalty as having a mean value of 1.8 to them. However, only every sixth business uses customer founder groups as a forum for exchanging ideas with customers and only every fifth has initiated a customer club, yet almost 50% of suppliers offers its customers supplier workshops.

In summary, since contacts with the customer should not be left to chance, the participants in the survey are implementing a broad spectrum of customer relationship measures designed to nurture their business contacts. On average, 6.6 different customer’s loyalty methods are used by each of the businesses questioned. Because of the critical importance of a good first impression (if it is not convincing, the supplier gets no second chance to raise its profile) intensified sales training of all employees who are in direct contact with the customer is identified as the most important measure that businesses are taking to strengthen their customer orientation.

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