Small Business Learns to Build Customer Loyalty Like Luxury Brands

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Sep 23, 2013) - There are more than 27 million small businesses in the United States, according to the Small Business Administration, but 50% of them will fail within five years. While lack of capital is a major factor, also significant is the lack of a customer-centric culture. 

"Many entrepreneurs launch businesses with a great product or service idea, and then proceed to focus on daily transactions rather than building long-term customer relationships," says Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Customer Culture Institute. "Focusing on transactions over relationships does not breed customer loyalty."

Successful smaller companies, says Pedraza, are organized at an early stage to deliver extraordinary experiences to every customer on a daily basis. The problem for most small businesses is a lack of expertise and a proven process.

To provide these companies with access to state-of-the-art methodologies and metrics to measure and boost customer satisfaction and loyalty, the Customer Culture Institute is launching a do-it-yourself, online software platform to help small businesses to create their own customer culture. Pedraza, who is also CEO of the highly-respected New York-based Luxury Institute, says the Customer Culture Navigator software enables business owners to communicate with and provide needed support and training for their employees in real-time.

Small business teams will use their creativity to custom design a cultural foundation with clear definitions of relationship values and standards. The software helps to train, measure and reinforce the culture daily, a process that has a track record of dramatically improved customer loyalty at large luxury and premium brands that Pedraza has previously coached. 

"We help move companies away from a soulless transaction mentality to profitable long-term customer relationship building," says Pedraza. "In essence, we teach them that outbehaving the competition leads to outperformance."

One innovative approach Pedraza and his team have taken, is to use crowdfunding site Indiegogo to raise funds from investors in the project. The campaign can be viewed at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/customer-culture-navigator/x/4837243

"Online crowdfunding is an elegant win-win-win opportunity," says Pedraza. "We have an opportunity to provide valuable resources to our funding contributors, while building a project that can transform small business culture and dramatically increase the success rate of small business."