Creating Loyal Customers is essential to the long term sustainability of any business in any industry.
The statistics are incredible. Studies show Loyal Customers come back more often spend more money each visit and talk about and promote your business to four to five times more people than a satisfied customer does. Loyal Customers even complain less. And for every dollar you spend keeping a loyal customer, it costs the typical business 5 dollars for a new customer. Loyal Customers, gotta love ‘em!
So how do you create loyal customers?
There are 3 essential connections that need to be understood.
o Points of Connection
o Personnel Connection
o Emotional Connection
What are points of connection? Points of connection will be every point where you’re customer (or prospective customer) comes into contact with your business. Points of connection include (but certainly not limited to) your website, your phone system, your location and so on. Every point of connection should be an easy to use, positive experience for your customer. If you’re a restaurant, you can have the best food in the world, but if the hostess is rude, you have degraded the experience for your customer. If the client has to go through a complicated phone tree to get to a real person that could be a real turn off. If your website is difficult to go thru or has old information, that could cause a problem in people’s perception of your business. All of the above mentioned make it more difficult for your customer in becoming a Loyal Customer.
Each point of connection needs to be (at the bare minimum) a neutral event, best if a positive experience. As each positive experience builds on other positive experiences, you expose the possibility of creating a Loyal Customer.
I did not type incorrectly when I typed Personnel Connection. Yes, personal connection is important and I’ll talk about it in step 3. Traditionally, when we think of customer service, we usually are focused on the front line people, those in front of the customer. However when you are talking about raising the bar and creating Loyal Customers, the personnel that need to be involved is everyone. Yes, everyone. CEO, Executive team, maintenance staff, tech geeks, back office staff, everyone. Here’s why.
Let’s start with the tech geeks. If they are in charge of the website, would a strong focus on creating loyal customers change the way they may look at working their website? Right now, they are probably disconnected. What you often see in companies is a constant back and forth between the tech folks and the customer service folks on making a customer-centric website. What a waste of time, money and meetings. And while that’s going on, you’re turning off the people you need most - customers. A customer loyalty focused staff resolves the issues before they even become a problem. This is true of any department.
How about the executive management team? After all, about once or twice a year, “customer service” becomes the topic of the moment and then satisfied that people get it, they move on to something else. Yet a couple months later, out comes a new corporate policy that has the front line people shaking their heads knowing that they just made it more difficult to work with their clients. It happens all the time. The executive team is so focused on bottom line results that they aren’t looking at the fact that they may drive customers away. Folks, customers are the bottom line results.
All’s you need to do is look at the industry leaders. Those company’s that continually produce results in good times and bad. They may not be flashy, but they are consistent. Look closer and you’ll see an organization that strives for creating loyal customers from the board room to the break room.
The third Connection is the Emotional Connection. Think of the places or businesses YOU feel loyalty to, whether it’s a restaurant, clothing store or even a particular hardware store. Is it an emotional connection? You bet it is! The fact is the vast majority of consumers want to be loyal; we love (an emotional word there!) having a favorite place or business. If nothing else, it makes our life easier. Loyal to an airline? Makes travel arrangements easier. Loyal to a restaurant? Guess where I’m taking guests from out of town. Loyal to a supply company? It’s so much easier than having to hunt for a new one each time.
Once you create that emotional connection where people like (dare I say love?) doing business with you and feel valued in return, it becomes increasingly more difficult for your competitor’s to whisper sweet nothings and take their business away.
By creating positive experiences with your business at every point of connection, internally creating a totally customer-centric operation and creating a relationship of respect and value, an emotional connection, you create a relationship more profitable, less problems and ultimately more satisfying to all parties concerned.
What a great connection to make!
Know how to advertise your business. Make your own marketing strategy that can grab more opportunity in the business industry. With the use of business cards tells all about your line of business. Through those cards are an easy way to create a lot of costumers and prospect clients. This is a dominant piece of card handed out to your costumers or clients. By customizing your card is one way of give out a first impression on the card. On the world of business, you can encounter many competitors. Create a card that expresses a sense that you are by name, name of the business, description of your business, freebies or discounts and other contact information so that they can easily keep in mind. The business card image and style gives your client or costumer the first impression on it. So be unique and can attract with the card itself. The card will speak for you.