Once upon a time, customers were loyal to brands; particular store chains, product lines, etc. “We offer this. If you buy a minimum, we’ll give you another.” That worked for over a century.

Today, customers know that their habits, preferences and behaviors are tracked, and that businesses can provide personalized offers relevant to their preferences.

They know “loyalty” is a two-way street.

One customer relationships expert, whose experience spans from advertising agencies to a publicly traded retailer; two successful startups in streaming audio, suggests businesses “capture, analyze and act on customer feedback… in near real-time.”

The advice is sound. But small local businesses interpret that advice is economically out of reach.

That interpretation is mistaken. Most successful small businesses are already “loyalty leaders”, with their “listening architectures” already in place, to an extent.

Small businesses often reward customers for referrals. Some use customer surveys. Some generate a form of “engagement” by asking customers to join their email or text message list. But most haven’t automated those processes. They could, and they should.

Asking customers to provide personal information on a postcard, or take a survey, even online, requires those customers to work for their rewards, which they're less and less wiling to do.

And having staff collect the information, or even just the postcards, comes with costs. One minute per work hour becomes more than $300 per year per employee.

“Architectures” like social wifi, for example (shameless plug) make it easy to gather customer information because it makes it easy for customers to share it. And customers WILL share information about their habits, preferences and past purchases in anticipation of return in the form of goods and services their profile shows they’re actually interested in.

That elevates the customer/business relationship. And that leads to growth.

Leveraging just 10% more “spend” per visit with 10% more visits, and those happy customers bringing in 10% more customers, turns into a 33% increase in revenues.

Rewarding those behaviors solidifies loyalty while gaining new customers and increases profits. But it also builds a larger and larger customer list — with more and more information they can use to constantly improve their business in the customer’s view.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have to recruit new customers independently. There are tools to help with that, too (side panel).