The Art of Customer Loyalty: How to Build a Company Customers Love

Customer loyalty is the golden goose everyone keeps talking about, but not a lot of business know how to maintain it. Creating a great customer experience is a hard and long process—especially if you don’t start working on it on time. After all, it is five times more expensive to gain new customers than to retain the ones you already have. Why not spend a little more time, effort and, yes, money, on keeping the existing ones happy. We call this “customer-centric”.

Word of mouth still rules

Although we live in a world of social networks, and an always-online attitude, something so fundamental as word-of-mouth should not be discarded easily. People still trust their friends and relatives more than an unknown person somewhere on the web. Keep them happy in the direct approach to problems—train your employees to deal with difficult customers in a satisfactory manner. People can be tough and inconsiderate, but it is your duty to do as much as you can to employ the right people, and educate them for the job. The customer is not “always right,” but in most cases they react well to empathy and good communication skills.

Target the right customers from the get-go

Your customer is not just some random person who stumbles upon your product by accident—or, at least, it should not be the idea of the right customer for you. Sit down and brainstorm who your products are for: old/young, male/female, students/working professionals etc. The list of potential options goes on, and it is up to you to tinker with it. Use the power of social networks to target your potential audiences by carefully setting up the parameters. Why waste your efforts, and budget when you have the tools to do the work for you?

Listen to the feedback

There is nothing that infuriates existing customers more than when they try to give you feedback on your product or service, and you are just not listening, or the company as a whole. Why not allow them an easy way to provide that feedback, which will allow you—the business—to get back to them just as quickly. Something like a customer feedback app, that will let you offer incentives, such as discount codes, when receiving less than the best opinions, or give you a direct line with the customer to hear their grievances.

Use your social media presence to help

Since, as we know, everyone is on a social network today, the chances that your customers will try to reach out to you on one of them is very high. Customers will do this on purpose, tagging the company in their post, expecting them to react in some way, and perhaps solve whatever problem they have. However, a number of customers will not tag the company—but they will perhaps mention the name of your company. Luckily, there are monitoring tools that allow you to keep on top of this and react timely. If the mention is negative, show up to ask what you can do to help. If the mention is positive, see if you can share it with your followers on that and other social networks as well.

Be authentic, be honest

The times, they are a-changing, as they always do. Customers have been growing up bombarded with marketing from the earliest days for several generations now—and a lot of them have developed some skepticism towards business trying to sell them things. They expect you will be all marketing fluff and no real talk—prove them otherwise. Be frank, be open, be empathetic. Surprise them. And speaking of surprises, if you have a really talented marketing team, try going for the fun angle. This might help in situations where you are stuck with persistent, boring customers who are just being petty.

And finally, what is the main point we can conclude here? Your customers will appreciate you showing care and being proactive, understanding their problems, and doing your best to help them. There is, of course, a limit to what you, as a company, can do for a customer, but if you have provided an honest and passionate attempt at providing support, the customers will know how to appreciate that.