In today’s competitive trading environment, building and maintaining customer loyalty are top priorities for successful firms. Remaining flexible to meet clients’ evolving needs is an essential component in developing stronger ties. Here’s some guidelines for developing a strong customer focused culture….
1. Communicate effectively: Any company with a high degree of customer loyalty is likely to have a client focused team who listen to client needs, demonstrate empathy and change course where necessary. Because clients buy relationships they can trust, they want to buy from people with whom they have rapport and who they know will respect and understand their needs and their preferences.
2. Practice the 80 / 20 rule: About 80% of revenue is often generated by 20% of customers. A smart company segments its customers by value and monitors activities closely to ensure high value customers get their fair share of creative offers and attention. Ranking customers according to actual revenue generation and then by life-time value is a wise approach. However, this, most certainly, does not mean that lower value customers should receive an inferior service.
3. Know your loyalty stages and ensure your customers are moving through them: A customer becomes loyal to a company and its products and service one step at a time. By understanding the customer’s current loyalty stage, we are better able to determine what is required to move the customer to a higher stage of loyalty.
4. Serve first, sell second: Customers believe business is earned with service that is responsive, productive and personalised; don’t deliver and they’ll leave or be tempted by competitors.
5. Store your data in one centralised database: To effectively implement a sound customer loyalty strategy, data from all customer touch points should be combined into a centralised customer database.
6. Seek out customer complaints: For most companies, only 10% of complaints are ever articulated by customers. The other 90% are unarticulated and manifest themselves in many negative ways: unpaid invoices; lack of courtesy to frontline service reps; and negative word of mouth which can damage a hard won reputation. Take action and listen closely to customers.
7. Get responsive, and stay that way: Research shows that responsiveness is closely tied to a customer’s perception of good service.
8. Know your customer’s definition of value: The loyalty password is value. Knowing what a customer values and then delivering on those terms is critical to building strong customer loyalty. Invest in some independent research to understand how well you deliver value.
9. Win back lost customers: Research shows that a business is twice as likely to successfully sell to a lost customer as to a brand new prospect. Yet winning back lost customers is frequently the most overlooked source for incremental revenue in many firms.
10. Collaborate with partners: In today’s complex marketplace, a business is often dependent on many suppliers to help serve its customers. Embracing these supply chain relationships for the greater good of the ultimate customer creates customer value that is difficult for competitors to match.
If you would like to commission independent research to ensure your firm’s customer loyalty procedures are effective, contact Joanne This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.