A customer is an individual or a corporate body that transact business with your company or your selling point using money as a medium of exchange or something of value in exchange to your product or service rendered to him/her. A customer is a very important personality (VIP) to any business. No wonder, there is an adage that “a customer is a king”. Without a customer, a business cannot survive no matter how essential the products or services provided by a company.
Gone are the times when businesses were set up just because the product is well conceived. Today, business owners know that satisfying customers’ needs is at the heart of the sustainability of their businesses. More important than starting a business is keeping your business afloat. Business sustainability is directly linked with the amount of customers who make repeated buys and stay loyal to the business.
However, one of the biggest mistakes a business can make is forgetting to maintain a relationship with a new customer. New customers are important, but most businesses often put a heap of energy into turning a potential customer into a customer, and as soon as they make the sale, they forget all about them and start chasing more new customers.
This is because, it is generally much easier, and a lot cheaper, to sell something else to an existing customer than to find and win a new customer.
Customer loyalty describes the tendency of a customer to choose one business or product over another for a particular need. According to Jim Novo, an interactive customer retention, defection, and loyalty expert clarifies that, while customers may express high satisfaction levels, this may not equal loyalty. “Loyalty is demonstrated by the action of the customer; customers can be very satisfied and still not be loyal”. Customer loyalty has become a catch-all term for the end result of many marketing approaches where customer data is used. Variously called relationship marketing or database marketing or permission marketing or Customer Relationship Management (CRM), the objective, in customer loyalty, is to get customers to choose to buy or visit more.
Increased customer loyalty, is to get customers to choose to buy or visit more. Increased customer loyalty is the end result. Customer loyalty has however remained as slippery as ever for most companies despite vast sums spent on ambitious loyalty programmes, relationship management schemes, and one-to-one marketing initiatives.
Managing customer relationship. Because of the importance of customer loyalty to the business, it is always an essential part of marketing called customer relationship management. Marketing experts and computer software developers have designed computer programs for effective customer management. This is sometimes known as customer retention programmes or customer relationship management programmes. Basically, all customer retention programmes rely on communicating with customers, giving them encouragement to remain active and choosing to do business with your company.
Though there are several of such programmes, the advice according to experts is have an effective loyalty programme is one thing that is mutually beneficial for both parties.
Unlocking the customers’ purse entails offering quality products and services as well as maintaining a good relationship with them over a long period of time – as long as your business continue to exist. The value of a loyal customer over time is very beneficial to the existence of any business. This is because, as the customer perceived the business or company as a responsible place to spend his/her money, he invite his friends, relatives, partners, colleagues etc to partner with him in doing business with you.
Another important aspect also is that, as you continue to harvest the benefits of maintaining customers, you have more resources to either diversified or introduce more products and services either as “standalone” or as “add-on”, which your loyal customer will be ready to use.
This in a long run entails while other businesses continue to exist for decades, while others sprang up with innovative products and disappear in the tin air.
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