We all know about the various loyalty schemes run by the big chains, whether they are supermarkets, airlines, department stories, online sellers etc.  Even small coffee shops do coffee cards to encourage repeat patronage.

However, I came across the rewarding of customer loyalty in a different way recently, which got me thinking about this topic again.

We have a local set of shops close to home, mostly food related (I know its a hardship…. lol). I regularly visit the local Charcoal Chicken shop because they have great chips and salads.  Over time, because they are great people and because I understand what its like being on their side of the counter, I have developed a relationship with the staff that work there.  You can imagine my delight when they told me recently that I was their favourite customer (and not just because I bought lots of stuff there).

This customer loyalty has not just been rewarded by their friendship and the conversations we share, but in other ways.  I have been shouted lunch as a Christmas gift and I now get a discount on anything I buy from them (and as I said, that’s often because it is so good!).

That got me thinking about customer loyalty at the local level.  They are a single shop, so don’t have have the buying power of a chain behind them, so anything they do comes directly from their end profit.  So I really appreciate the discount, because I know what it costs them.

Now translate that to the library world.  We all have great regular customers who utilise our services and borrow our items weekly if not more often. I know of library users who are on our website and catalogue almost daily.  How can we reward those customers, encourage them to make even more use of the library and to also be our unheralded ambassadors to all they know?

One problem with this concept, especially in the bigger library where I work, is being able to identify these regulars.  We have so many staff, who work at different libraries, so we don’t always realise that the people we serve each day are loyal, regular users.  Sure we recognise some, but it wouldn’t been fair to offer a customer loyalty service to some and not others.  So how do we discover these people?

The next problem is what do we offer them? We don’t charge to place holds at our library, so we can’t offer free holds for them. We do charge fines, but are hoping to remove those in future, so even if we could discount fines for our regulars, it would only be a (hopefully) short term solution. We have unlimited loans on most item types, although we still have some limits on AV, so maybe there’s  potential there.

Some may say that our services and collections, being free, are reward enough. They are a reward in their own right, but my charcoal chicken place provides good quality food at a reasonable price and still give me a discount for loyalty (and being a nice person… :) ).

So the only things I have been able to come up with for our loyal, regular library users, have been discounted fines and increased AV limits.  Anything else that you can think of would be appreciated. These people are the lifeblood of our public library and deserve to be rewarded.  Please help me to figure out how we could do that.

And by the way, Happy New Year!