The Loyalty Huddle: A Weekly Meeting to Build Employee and Customer Loyalty

Earning loyalty is much more than teaching lessons in good service techniques. It’s far more than giving everyone a copy of Customer Service for Dummies and ordering the team to smile and say, “Have a nice day.” Your challenge is to model, teach, and reinforce the practices and principles that will earn loyalty.

The loyalty huddle is a simple, yet critical tool to build team capability and bring a Loyalty Leader Mindset into practice.

These short, targeted meetings—huddles—will teach and reteach the practices and principles of earning loyalty to your team. “More meetings,” you ask? Exactly. A brief weekly, or even daily, huddle to move the needle on customer loyalty is the key to influencing loyalty behavior.

We recommend you lead eleven targeted huddles with your team, each designed to strengthen a skill.

The Loyalty Huddle has four parts:

Celebrate: Recognize success in increasing loyalty and applying the principle or practice discussed in the most recent huddle. Most important, celebrate individuals who are creating customer promoters. Such recognition should be timely, to ensure that the employee knows the significance of the recent achievement. Be generous about celebrating successes, and you will see more of them.

Learn: The next agenda item in the loyalty huddle is to learn about a principle or practice that creates loyalty. Assign a team member to read a chapter in this book ahead of time and then lead the huddle. Everyone knows that the teacher learns more than the student, so if everyone takes a turn leading the huddle, you can be confident that they are internalizing the loyalty principles. Invite team members to share any insights they have from observing or following up with customers. “What are we learning? What is working well for customers? What should we improve?”

Commit: Make commitments to apply what was learned in the huddle to create more customer promoters. “What could each of us commit to do this week? What new things should we try?” Note how important it is to follow through on commitments made in the huddles. Let your team members know that you expect them to keep their commitments and that they will be reporting on them in the huddles.

Schedule Follow-up: Before leaving the huddle, make sure you schedule the next huddle meeting, determine who will lead it, and what loyalty practice or principle will be discussed.

The repetitive nature of these huddles ensures that each practice and principle of loyalty becomes woven into the fabric of your loyalty culture. Have fun in the huddle so the team looks forward to the next one. After completing all eleven huddles the first time, discussions will become even more interesting and interactive. 

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Go in-depth on the huddle process and come away with a deeper understanding of the principles and practices to build customer loyalty. Register to attend a complimentary webcast.

About the Author

Sandy Rogers leads FranklinCovey’s Loyalty Practice. He was previously Senior Vice President at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. During his 14 years there, Sandy managed the turnaround of the London, England operation and led the teams that developed Enterprise’s marketing strategy and system for improving customer service across all branches. Before Enterprise, Sandy worked in marketing at Apple Computer and at P&G. He is graduate of Duke and Harvard Business School.

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