How Customer Service and Customer Experience Create Brand Loyalty
On my university campus there are many different food trucks that offer amazing food. Some of my friends have asked me “food from a food truck?! You’d eat that?!”, but yes, Jennifer, I would. Every day if I could, and every time I think about what cuisine I want since there are so many options! There are multiple food trucks that serve Halal, Chinese, and American cuisines, but I always go to three specific trucks, my favorite ones. I have tried every single food truck on my campus, but it’s always those three that I go to: the green Halal truck near the campus mascot statue, Andy’s Chinese Food Truck, and Pete’s Lunchbox Truck for my breakfast sandwich needs.
You may think that as a student I chose those trucks because they are the cheapest price, but you’d only be partially right. As a customer who has tried every single food truck on campus, there was more to my decision than just what is cheapest or tastes best. For example, on campus there exists this almost perfect competition market with the Halal trucks. Every truck offers the same food at the same price, with the same ingredients and no variation in the menu. One or two trucks may use different suppliers or different ingredients, but the majority of the twelve trucks on campus are exactly the same since they are licensed out by the same company. The quality between them is indiscernible, the price does not vary, and all of them are equally fast in service. So what really sealed my preference for that Halal food truck near my school mascot’s statue? It was the workers in that food truck. Only there was I engaged with and asked about my day, called “my friend” at the end of nearly every sentence, and feel valued for choosing to order food at that truck that day. No other employees from the other Halal food trucks treated their customers so memorably, leading me to prefer that one particular Halal truck whenever I wanted to get their cuisine. I felt like more than a customer; I felt like I had a connection with the gentlemen working in the truck.
It’s very common in today’s world of business for customers to be viewed as sources of money and treated transactionally, only caring about the point-of-sale experience of a customer. There are some companies who do not care about one-star reviews or negative word-of-mouth advertising because they are content offering products or services that are fast, or cheap, or carry a status symbol of luxury. These companies are competing in non-loyal spaces, the kind where if a customer was offered an alternative that was slightly faster, or slightly cheaper, or was a little more luxurious, they would switch immediately to that other brand. To those businesses, they are not establishing themselves as brands worth remembering. If they asked themselves the question of “why would customers stay with us if a competitor offered something cheaper/faster/more luxurious than us” and could not come up with a better answer, then they are already poised to decline once that competitor comes along.
Where companies can truly stand out is in the customer experience space. Cheapness, quality, luxury, all of these things do not create brand loyalty; it’s the company’s customer service and how the company engages with their customers that establishes the base to build loyalty from. When you think about loyalty to an organization or business, you might recall the experiences and connections you make with those individuals you talked to who represent the company. This comes from the customer service you received in which you developed a personal relationship with the company. Cheapness or quality is not something someone creates a relationship with. A great video that talks about this is Valuetainment’s video titled “Customer Service Vs. Customer Experience” which discusses those types of qualities I previously mentioned many companies focus on (price, speed, quality, etc). In it, Patrick Bet-David talks about how companies can only truly create loyalty through providing exceptional customer service and experience, and goes into the differences between the two. I highly recommend watching it.
The greatest takeaway from the video is that customer service is reactive while customer experience is proactive. What does this mean? Well, thinking back to my story about the experience I had with the Halal food truck, every Halal food truck had some form of customer experience since, as a customer, I needed to engage with the employees to order and pay for my food. Most trucks’ employees were transactional; as a customer, I initiated the contact in ordering, and when they waved me over to signal my food was finished being made, I paid and left without much conversation. Their style of customer service was reactive to what I said or did. The same kind of reactive engagement with customers can be seen in customer support centers for many companies: employees have scripted responses and react to what the customer is saying or doing. There is no attempt to think ahead or treat the customer as a person because with scripted responses it shows that the company only thinks of the customer as they engage with them. This culture prepares employees to not think about each customer as a person and show them that they are valued and thought of beyond the transaction.
My favorite Halal truck, on the other hand, is proactive in their customer service. Regardless of how many customers visit them, they still remember my name, my major, and my favorite order. Even though I am sure they ask every student who comes to order how their studies are going, it’s a proactive engagement with their customer that makes the experience much more memorable. My emotions throughout the experience are positive and I feel valued by them asking me about my day and about what I’m dealing with at school. No other Halal truck employees on campus do that, which is why it isn’t only me that loves that truck so much. On my university’s subreddit and Discord server, they’re known as the “green truck by the statue,” the “my friend men,” and the “best Halal truck on campus.” Whenever they pop up in a post or discussion, sometimes other individuals will mention a different truck has better ingredients, but no one has ever brought up that a different Halal truck rivals that green truck and their customer service.
That difference between being reactive and proactive is what creates emotional connections between a company and its customers. It’s hard to compete in a perfect competition market with just your food, so those gentlemen in the green Halal truck found a way to innovate and incorporate themselves into the business model, using their personalities to engage with customers and build a reputation that exists beyond any marketing campaign can accomplish. This is evident by how, at lunchtime nearly every day, that green food truck always has a crowd around it, while the other truck twenty feet further down the sidewalk does not. Everyone knows that food truck is the best; not for the food, not for the speed of service, but because they have the best memories of ordering at that green Halal truck by the mascot statue.
