Case Study:
Customer Loyalty Impacts Business Growth

Because of their work to build and maintain loyalty customer relationships, this global data storage firm is seeing big results with greater business growth.

While many assert that loyalty is simply repeat purchase, Walker’s Loyalty Matrix is designed to address the elements of both behavioral loyalty as well as attitudinal loyalty. By adding the attitudinal dimension, we are able to further segment the customer base. Truly loyal customers tend to purchase more, are more secure sources of revenue, will be prone to buying a broader range of products, and are more likely to recommend the company to future customers.

This leading data storage firm wanted to better understand and quantify how improving customer loyalty would impact business and their growth.

Challenge

This company sought to link customer loyalty to actual revenue growth. They have been systematically listening to their largest, most strategic customers for the past five years and wanted to provide alignment of their work that building and maintaining loyal customer relationships is paying off with greater growth.

How

They included accounts that had at least three respondents in both FY10 and FY11, and measured the loyalty of each.

Outcome

Year over year, they found the most loyal customers grew faster. They’ve also confirmed that what customers indicate regarding their future spending plans via the annual survey aligns very closely with their actual purchases. When 60 percent of customers indicated their spending would increase in the coming year, bookings for those customers actually grew more than $240 million.

But, the most significant payoff they’re seeing is the impact their account teams have with their customers. Looking back over the past two fiscal years, there is a set of customers who have participated in the survey each year and experienced effective follow-up from their account teams regarding their input each year. This set of customers’ bookings grew $72 million during that time – a rate that is twice that seen across the company on average.