One question you should always ask yourself as a brand manager is – Have your customers been loyal to your brand?
Customer loyalty is an age-old problem, right from the inception of companies and brands. If you have problems in gaining customers who stay loyal, you know for sure it’s time to revamp the existing customer service strategies. Customer loyalty can only be earned not given, and is a dream for many organizations.
The path towards excellent service is paved by great user experience and impeccable customer support. Organizations are in a rush to earn more profits and often forget the value of brand loyalty. You should always be mindful of the fact that it might be easy to acquire customers but it requires real skill to have lifetime advocates for your brand.
Here, I have compiled a list of few customer loyalty tips, to help you achieve your aim of increasing customer love. Happy reading!
1. Predict the Requirement: To provide exceptional services, it is very necessary for organizations to understand the needs of customers. Loyalty will come to you when you predict your customer’s requirements before they are vocalized. A great way to anticipate the customer’s needs is observing their buying behaviour, pattern of purchase and active listening to their problems. Therefore, instead of asking customers about their requirements, it is better to focus on the more important part – ‘need anticipation’. With the help of effective customer loyalty solutions, organizations can retain customers by capturing data and text interactions. The captured data can be beneficial towards gaining in-depth knowledge about the customer. This will help you develop a granular understanding of segment behavior, needs and expectations, and buying preferences, which aids in providing delightful customer service.
2. Provide Customized Services: Allowing customers to create their own unique product is sometimes a great way to earn loyalty. Customization help companies to reach a specific target such as the millennial shoppers. These set of people are known for their changing preferences. With so many players competing in the market, millennials have the option to avail services from any of them. Thus, they demand more personalized products. So, a good customer service strategy should focus more on winning customers by understanding how much customization they need and how amazing experiences can be delivered.
3. Take Regular Feedbacks: Brands that have the ability to listen to their customers have always been able to reach new heights. Paying attention to individuals as well as group interactions is a pretty crucial task. Feedback and opinions are a great way to know about the pain points of customers and thereby, improve business, products/services, and the overall customer experience. Customer feedback should not be treated as an activity that you put at the bottom of the pipeline or share with interns. On the contrary, it should be taken seriously and considered an extremely valuable source of information for creating a successful brand.
4. More Focus on Loyalty Programs: Organizations need to give a head start to customers to earn their loyalty. They are associated with our daily purchasing activities, even if we don’t always recognize them. Loyalty programs give customers advanced access to new products, special sales coupons or free merchandise. They are considered as one of the best ways to boost the customer loyalty towards a brand by encouraging them to purchase more frequently.
5. Increase engagement through shared values: According to a research – ‘64% of participants said shared values were the primary reason for maintaining a relationship with their brand’. Emotional attachment with brands do exist and it usually starts with a shared value that the consumers hold in common with a brand. Therefore, in today’s business environment, it is very necessary to relate to customers’ beliefs rather than designing strategies meant for moving products. In order to do so, organizations must design their campaign and demonstrations in a way that that truly reflects the emotions and beliefs of customers. This will help them in earning good word of mouth with increased brand loyalty.
Related: Decode the True Value of Customer Loyalty [Infographic]
