Welcome back! Thanks for coming back to read this blog.

For all those of you who collect points and miles here and there, I think it is time to decide what makes you loyal.

In my case I believe, and I will always believe, that points or miles are simply a metaphor for a discount, often a discount you give to your frequent users. The challenge with them is the bigger the user, the less value the discount is. If I fly 1 million miles every year, how much of an incentive is a flight, regardless of destination? I probably would most likely enjoy sitting at home, for a change.

The greatest loyalty programme of all is actually two words – “Welcome back”. Maybe I should rephrase that. It’s “Welcome back, Mr Hughes” (in my case).

It’s as simple as that. For me, it’s more about the recognition of loyalty than it is about the reward. The reason why I say this is because it would seem that the recognition piece is the most difficult piece of all and also the bit that gets forgotten.

I say this after returning from my Saturday morning jaunt to get coffee. After months of training I have finally managed to break the coffee shop that I go to. They have gone from “What would you like?” to “Good morning, how are you?”

A subtle difference is behind this. Every day I order the same thing, every day I go to the same shop. “What would you like?” identifies that the person behind the counter did not pay attention yesterday, the day before or the day before. This to me is irritating. In the new, loyal reality of my coffee shop, “Good morning, how are you?” is silently followed by me handing over money, a bit of banter and then, “Your drink’s ready at the end”. And guess what? I didn’t have to even mention what it was I was going to drink. Recently the manager has noticed what car I drive and as she sees it pulling up outside, she starts my order, ready to take away.

I have a loyalty card from this and 100 other coffee shops. But the reason I go back to this particular one is because they know me and because they know that, in the morning, I want my large, white Americano, a smile and a sharp exit. The loyalty card is just a discount.

This morning, however, a new person was working. And this is where the loyalty thing falls down. The first thing she says was “what would you like to drink?”

True commitment to customer service does what I have seen done on great cruise lines and in great hotels. As the guest enters, they are caught on camera and the image is flashed around and learnt by key staff.

The net result is that as you walk around you are greeted by “Good morning, Mr Hughes.” Recognition. I can be faceless in almost every place I go in the world. But great loyalty from me is driven by recognition, and the simple words “Welcome back, Mr Hughes”, “Good Morning, Mr Hughes” and even better, in the most remarkable of cases, “Nice to see you again, Ian”. But that’s rare.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

The front page of USA today announced something that I told you, my loyal readers about nearly 6 years ago – that supermarkets are beginning to trust their customers. There are more and more self check-out tills going in to supermarkets all over the USA and the UK.

The fundamental principal that sits behind this is one is easy. If you trust your customers then they can just check themselves out, rather than paying people to swipe something over a scanner.

I first broke this story several years ago in the UK when my local store started handing out scanners. That way I could just scan my goods as I picked them off the shelf and then put them straight in my bag. Flying through checkout at the end. Brilliant.

That’s not the story; the real story is how some stores are actually taking this technology out.

Why remove technology? And what are they replacing it with? People!

Yup, people are making a comeback. Companies are trying to differentiate themselves on service and to do that you need people.

The problem for me is this; the spotty diffident youths of today have forgotten how to serve. As a direct result this, the whole service thing could fall flat on its face.

The other day, I was checking myself out in a Stop and Shop in the USA and an item triggered an alert. This required a spotty oik to come and reset the machine. He grunted in my general direction, scanned something and then disappeared back to the conversation that he had been having before the machine so rudely interrupted him.

This morning I was ordering coffee from a hole in the wall drive through. The speaker blurted out a string of monotone sounds, which I slowly deciphered as English. Having ordered my coffee, I pulled around to overhear a conversation from the two year old teller saying “he thinks I am Jose, why does he think that?” about the customer behind me. Perhaps because you try so hard to sound the same?

I believe that customer service is the future, I am sure of it. The more that people rip service out of the system, the more I believe there is a market for service.

BUT, you need people that understand service to carry out these roles, and that is becoming a rarer and rarer commodity. The days of people considering that great service is an art have gone and these days, spotty oiks go to universities and leave with dreams of being video technicians, journalists or multimedia engineers. How’s that working out for them?

We should be teaching people great customer service. It’s a dying art.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

This has been a very long downturn. Since 2008 business has been living with the burden of reduced business and consumer expenditure.

The result has been that business has had to cut its cloth to suit and slowly but surely unemployment has risen. The other impact is that slowly but surely there have been fewer and fewer people around to serve and those that are left are earning relatively less.

From a pure economics perspective that’s fine. Business has to cut its cloth according to its means. However, there is a really good chance that we are reaching the end of this process now and this brings with it a totally different set of management challenges.

As business begins to tick back up again, the tightly stretched and cheaper resource will begin to stretch tighter. Initially this will be good news because there is more revenue coming in with less cost going out, profits will rise. But, very quickly, this could turn into a death spiral. In the last few days I have already seen instances in service businesses where they haven’t been serving.

- Like a telephone call that needs to be referred on to a supervisor that requires a returned call that doesn’t come – that creates a follow up call from an irritated customer, which quickly spirals.

- Like a call to take advantage of a special offer that is now sold out – that turns into a negative experience.

- Like standing in line at a store where inexperienced staffs are not opening new tills (to the frustration of the supervisor calling them over).

- Like the two day stay in a hotel where the air-conditioning hasn’t been fixed.

All these are examples of where service is being under-delivered in such a way that will impact on the business in the longer term. When new companies enter the markets that are able to better serve, they will hoover up business for dis-affected customers of the low-serve businesses – which really brings us to the crux of the issue.

When is the right time to invest in customer service? I would say just before we start coming out of recession, right now (in the UK). In fact, maybe about 2-3 months ago. Because it takes time to find and train good staff.

The cost of doing this at a time of austerity might be difficult but without any doubt at all, the cost of not doing it will sink your company.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

Those of you who are keen observers of this web site will notice that we have a new brand.

The branding process has been an interesting journey for me and for those of us at Consumer Intelligence. There was nothing wrong with our old brand. We had it for eight years and it worked fine. It was two circles – one containing a C and the other containing an I.

All fine.

So why change? Well, actually I would contest that the company had already changed and the brand was trying to catch-up with that change.

To me a brand is not about lines and colours, it’s about a series of things that define who we are, what we stand for and how people will feel when they come into contact with us. As a company that helps others manage their brand experience, we needed to work relentlessly on ours. And we do.

We grew up as a small business where lots of people could talk to each other. A brand was the chemistry that existed between those people. As we have evolved our chemistry, our DNA is imbued by new and exciting elements brought to us from the new and exciting people that we have here.

After a while, however, the questions become silently deafening. Questions like: who are we? What are we doing here? Where are we going? What do we stand for? How do we work? What does it feel like to be part of this thing?

I say silently deafening because no one actually ever stands up in a session and says any of them, but you get a sense of a few different things that make you think, we need to get a grip on this.

Fortunately for us, the central dream of Consumer Intelligence has actually been at our core since the first day we started. We call it “owning the asterisk”. In other words, wherever important decisions are being made you will see the words *Research by Consumer Intelligence beside some exciting piece of insight and say “That’s good insight, now I feel empowered to make the right decision”.

The new “visual identity”, known as the asterisk, is the first visual statement of what we stand for and where we are going. But what sits underneath the creative look and feel is what the brand is all about.

That work is the journey of a lifetime, an unrelenting mission to achieve a goal, based on the train tracks of our values. Though clearly, the straighter the track, the faster the train.

Fun stuff. Exhausting fun.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about my watch being fixed. And now I need to write the epilogue to it.

First I will start with an apology, the purpose of this blog is not to talk about watch repair, it’s to share stories of great customer service. This is just a really great story and is a great lesson to others about the value of superb service.

To be clear, the age old model of Quality, Service and Price applies in this circumstance so let’s not pull any punches on that.

If you have forgotten the model it goes like this. There are only three things you can sell on, Quality, Service and Price. As a customer you have to select two and sacrifice the third. So you can’t have a great price and great service and get great quality, it breaks the rule. You can’t have great service and great quality and get a great price. It just can’t happen over the long term.

So this story is one about how a company gave great service and great quality, although it wasn’t the cheapest price. If that causes you offence, then stop reading now.

Let me now name the company. It’s Wempe. They are a German watch manufacturer. Actually my broken watch isn’t a Wempe but it is a brand they sell in their shop and I like Wempe because their hometown is Hamburg, as is my Mum’s.

In their shop on New Bond Street they repair watches. I had dropped mine on a concrete floor and it had become unhappy with me.

The first person who served me (the person from the first story) was Alexander Hemmerling. I didn’t want to mention him in my first story because I hadn’t asked permission.

But when I went to collect my watch I was served by Paul Fuchs, he also gave spectacular service and I asked if it would be OK to write this piece and mention them.

He was delighted. He talked about the watches they have there and even the winding mechanisms for automatic watches when you aren’t wearing them. Actually “talked” is the wrong word. “Enthused” would be a better word. As he told stories of the heritage of watches, his passion for art showed.

When he handed me back my fixed watch, I gave him back the loaner. I would not be “timeless” after all.

“No”, says Paul, “keep it with my pleasure.”

“Wow” I said, “thank you!”

“Wow, that’s amazing do you have a ladies version?” said my wife. She was joking, clearly.

“Yes” says Paul and produces one for her.

“I was just joking, i don’t mean it” says my wife.

“I know you were, but I am not” says Paul.

Despite our protestations, Paul was more than happy for us to keep the temporary watches, insistent in fact. He apologised that they were just cheap quartz ones but they do carry the word Wempe on them, so it will be a constant reminder to me of the place to go to get all your time needs satiated!

Wow.

That is not the story, however. Not by a long shot. This isn’t the story of a good “shop assistant” working in an excellent shop.

Paul and Alexander are not shop assistants as their business cards clearly state. For, while Paul was serving me, Alexander wasn’t serving someone else or lurking for a customer to arrive. No, he was making a watch because that’s what it says on their cards “Watchmaker”. Their white coats are required for their precision laboratory, which is right there next to the counter.

Paul told me he is going to the manufacturer of my watch in September so he would be able to fix it himself, then it would be faster and cheaper for me. I can’t wait.

“Advocate Maker” the card should say.

Ian Hughes is the CEO of Consumer Intelligence, a market research company that is dedicated to helping its customers make intelligent decisions using the best possible insight.