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Last Updated on June 20, 2017 by Work In My Pajamas
Whether you’re operating a hot dog stand or launching the latest tech startup, you can’t overlook the importance of customer loyalty to the future of your business. Acquiring new customers is much more difficult and expensive than retaining the ones you already have. The following are some key strategies for keeping customers happy.
In This Post:
Provide Incentives for Loyalty
One simple way to build a consistent following is to provide incentives that keep rewarding your best customers for their business. Special menus at a restaurant, extra discounts at a hardware store, redeemable reward points, gift giveaways, or free shipping with online purchases are the kind of perks that customers appreciate, and they’ll keep coming back to get more. These are actually small costs compared to the kind of sustainable profits they’ll bring you.
Create Excellent Customer Experiences
Loyal customers are happy customers. A bad customer service experience such as long waits, rude agents, or failure to back up your promises or product will create angry customers. The majority of consumers will end a company relationship if they’re unhappy with the service. It’s important that all your customer-facing employees understand that helping the customer is their priority. Empathy, patience, and good listening skills are important to every customer interaction.
Keep Open Communications
Maintaining communications with your customers will help to keep you in their thoughts, but also allows you to both collect and distribute critical information. Invite your customers to give their phone number, email address, home address, or social media profiles. This can help you to reach out to them on all these channels. You can send your preferred customers sales notices or coupons on products they might like, send informative newsletters, make fun social posts about your company, or invite feedback to get some suggestions.
Invest in Soft Skills
There are a great many software products that can help make virtually any aspect of business more efficient or accurate. Keeping up with technology tools should not be a primary concern for businesses that are still discovering their brand and market share. Successful business is about human relationships and great people skills. Especially for independent professionals like lawyers, interactive skills training can be important to satisfying and retaining clients. Such skills can be learned with the help of specialized workshops or retreats, such as those that The Rainmaker Institute does.
In a competitive world, expanding your business is next to impossible without a strong base of loyal customers to work from. Get the training to ensure neither yourself nor your staff forget that the customer IS your business.
