When you have a business, one of the most important things that you can have is loyal customers. You want people to come back to you again and again and know that you can count on their dollars. These are customers who are going to be with you through thick and thin and that believe in your business.
According to Business Insider, some of the brands that have the most loyal customers include Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Hyundai. These are the brands that people love and where people go to when they are looking for certain services. Wouldn’t you love to be on that list next year? Well, it’s not something that is going to happen overnight. But there are things that you can do to help build up your customer loyalty.
Ingredients You Need for a Customer Loyalty Recipe
Be Reliable
When you are constantly following through and executing what you say you will do, you are deemed reliable by your customers. Standardize your product and service quality. A good example is McDonalds. No matter what McDonalds you go to, you know that you are going to get the same burgers and fries.
When you are reliable, you will get repeat business. It’s going to take some time for you to build up this reliability, especially when you are a new business. But once customers are seeing that you are reliable, they will come back again and again just like they go back again and again to McDonalds.
Be Credible
Credibility is enhanced anytime you do what you’ve said you are going to do each and every time. Don’t hold any hidden agendas. Your customers know that you need to make money, so don’t try implying that you are just doing it for fun. Provide some value and then remind the customers of the value you provide.
Be Responsive
Always share the urgency that your customers have. Provide your customers with some simple access to the information that they might need, like shipment tracking, delivery schedules, and other things. Use the web if you can for this, since people are starting to expect this kind of access. But keep in mind that a lot of eCommerce companies are giving their customers live access to people if they have a problem.
Have a strategy for customer recovery that’s aggressive. Be certain that all of your employees recognize a customer’s value. Teach them the way to bring customers that are potentially lost back to the company, even if there’s a high short-term cost. Empower your employees to make some good decisions for the needs of customers rather than just the needs of the company.
Empathize
According to Business Know How, empathy is important to earning customer trust and loyalty. Assess the emotions of customers and then mirror the emotions. If your customer’s seem anxious, give them reassurance. If your customer is excited about your product, share your excitement through voice, comments, and nonverbal messages. Use their terms to reinforce their feelings.
Work to understand your customer’s sensory preferences when it comes to kinesthetic, auditory, and visual information. Listen for certain key terms and use the cues to create a rapport. If the customer indicates that they prefer visual information, give them the information visually. If they prefer auditory information, let them have the information that way. If their preference is kinesthetic, then allow them to feel the service or product.
Hire Great Employees
Choose your frontline employees due to their emotional intelligence as well as their skills. Hire people who have good attitudes and upbeat personalities. Then you can teach them necessary skills.
You also can look for good employees at other companies. If you are receiving great service from an employee, think about hiring them for your company. Create a file of these kinds of candidates and then reach out to these potential employees. You don’t want to simply wait for their application to come across your desk.
Constantly train your employees
Create a training process that is ongoing. This doesn’t need to have a formal setting but the training ought to be built around a skillset that’s critical to the success of your company. Involve your employees with designing the curriculum. Ask your employees what they want to know and then find the sources for giving them training in the areas.
These are some of the things that you can do to help you with building customer loyalty. Another thing that you can do is to give out customer loyalty cards, like Whole Foods recently started doing as reported by Courier Post Online. But without the steps above, the loyalty cards won’t make that big of a difference.
