Having a loyal customer base is essential to achieve long-term business growth. However, achieving such a feat is not an easy task. In fact, more than one in three companies say that generating new business is their biggest worry.
If you share the same worry, then read on as we detail in this post the four effective yet actionable steps to build a strong and loyal customer base.
1. Make Customer Service a Priority
According to a survey, 91% of customers will not do business with you again if you fail to provide them with quality customer service the first time. Considerably, a single purchase experience can leave a lasting impression on how your customers view you as a brand. Therefore, it is critical that you improve how your employees treat your customers. Even more so, how your sales team treats their clients. That is to reduce potential hurdles from beginning to end.
Your sales team, of all people in your organisation, must have the ability to communicate effectively and strategically. That means with both the present and potential customer. It is therefore worth considering to invest in a sales training program to establish a competent and customer-focused sales team.
More importantly, it is worth noting that customer service is not only the concern of your sales or contact centre agents. Anyone interacting with the customer is involved in the delivery of customer service. As such, everyone in your business must be educated about the importance of providing top-notch service. As well as learn how such strategy can help your company transform into a full-fledged customer-centric organisation.
2. Learn as Much as Possible About Your Customers
Having a competent sales team would be useless if you do not know the things that matter the most to your customer. In order to build a loyal customer base, you must have an intuitive understanding of their current situation. As well as the challenges they are facing. This is in line with a statistic from Wunderman which states that 79% of consumers believe that brand must first demonstrate that they understand and care about them before they consider purchasing.
If you are able to understand their pain points and then demonstrate in detail how your solution can help solve or alleviate their problems, they will cease to see you as a mere provider of goods and services and start treating you as a partner and then would be very unlikely to go anywhere else.
3. Offer Rewards That Your Customers Actually Want
While establishing a customer loyalty program is an effective way to keep the customer loyal, it does not guarantee that all your customers would appreciate it. This is often because the customers do not like the rewards being offered in the first place.
If you have an existing rewards program, you need see if you are providing offers that are of value. To see that, you need to look at the number of inactive members of your loyalty program. If those numbers are trending negatively, then there is a chance that you are offering the wrong rewards.
Benefits are not benefits if your customers do not find any use for it. Again, having the wrong offerings in your loyalty program can stem from the fact that you do not know your customers very well. To ensure the success of your loyalty program, you need to collect and analyse relevant customer information and then use that information to personalised your offerings.
4. Stay Connected with Your Customers
To increase your customer base, you need stay in constant contact with potential and existing customers. This should be easy given the explosion of smartphones and social media these days. With this explosion comes the ever-increasing number of people who share their customer experience in the digital sphere. Unfortunately, customers are more likely to use social media to share their awful experiences they had to their connections. In fact, over 1 million people view tweets about customer service every week – 80% of which are negative or critical in nature.
This means that the modern consumer not only discusses their experience in real-life discussions but also shares their opinions on social media. And if you do not have presence in these platforms, you are at risk of gaining a bad reputation, not to mention that you are losing a lot of opportunities to your competition as well.
By staying connected with your customers on social media and other digital platforms, you can turn them into vocal advocates of your brand, and as such, your customer themselves can improve what is being said in those channels about your company. This social proof will help you attract more prospects, close more deals, and keep more loyal customers.
Loyal customers are the best customers. If you want to learn how our Business Coaching and Sales Training can help you grow a strong and loyal customer base, contact us today on 1300 833 574.
