The key to successful business is a steady customer base. After all, successful businesses typically see 80 percent of their business come from 20 percent of their customers. Too many businesses neglect this loyal customer base in pursuit of new customers. However, since the cost of attracting new customers is significantly more than what is required to maintain your relationship with existing ones, your efforts toward building customer loyalty will certainly payoff. The following are ten success tips on how to build and sustain customer loyalty:
#1. Communicate
Whether it is an email newsletter, monthly flier, a reminder card for a tune up, or a holiday greeting card, reach out to your steady customers. When you are constantly in touch with your customers, it creates an ambience of camaraderie and a sense of appreciation, the situation that can always guarantee you such a customer’s loyalty.
#2. Customer service
Go the extra mile and meet your customers’ needs. Train your staff to do the same (if you have any). Customers remember being treated well. Customer service is key because it is the direct interface you have with the clients. The way you relate with them, address their worries and concerns determines how they see you and the interest you represent.
#3. Employee loyalty
Loyalty works from the top down. If you are loyal to your employees, they will feel positively about their jobs and pass that loyalty along to your customers. But if the reverse is the case, they certainly will transfer such feelings to the customers and your product or service would be the worst for it.
#4. Employee training
It is very important to train employees in the manner that you want them to interact with customers. Empower employees to make decisions that benefit the customer without having to always recourse to a higher authority. Here, empowerment is central as your employees’ confidence and capability will surely have a way of impacting on your business.
#5. Customer incentives
Always give customers a reason to return to your business. For instance, because children outgrow shoes quickly, the owner of a children’s shoe store might offer a card that makes the tenth pair of shoes half price. Likewise, a dentist may give a free cleaning to anyone who has seen him regularly for five years.
In most marketing strategy, it always work s magic when customers know that there is always something extra in everything for them. You can initiate sales bonanzas and other related promotional activities to reward your customers as well as draw new and prospective customers into your fold.
#6. Product awareness
Know what your steady patrons purchase and keep these items in stock. Add other products and/or services that accompany or compliment the products that your regular customers buy regularly. And make sure that your staff understands everything they can about your products.
#7. Reliability
Trust is the key word here. If you say a purchase will arrive on Wednesday, deliver it on Wednesday. Be reliable. If something goes wrong, let customers know immediately and compensate them for their inconvenience. Never attempt to play on their intelligence or try to assume that they may never discover. The price for such games could be disastrous. Avoid it.
#8. Be flexible
Try to solve customer’s problems or complaints to the best of your ability. Excuses such as “that’s our policy” will lose more customers, then set the store on fire. Here the rule is not to be rigid. Even if your company policy does not accommodate certain situation, you can still bend the rule to take care of some of those exigencies, provided of course, they do not go against the law.
#9. People over technology
The harder it is for a customer to speak to a human being when he or she has a problem, the less likely it is that you will see that customer again. Make use of humans than machine. Let there be a human interface or else, some customers who are less exposed to hi-tech may seek options elsewhere.
#10. Know your customers’ names
Remember the theme song to the theme song to the television show Cheers? Get to know the names of your regular customers or at least recognize their faces. Identify them and relate with them intimately.
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