How to Keep Customers Satisfied and Loyal

Is your business obsessed with making sure your customers love your products, services, and the entire customer experience? That type of obsession is common to the companies you’ll find atop any list of companies with strong customer satisfaction scores, and it’s not hard to achieve, regardless of budget. Here are a few suggestions we recommend for businesses in the verticals we serve.

Fulfill your promises

Do your advertising and marketing materials, including your website, make claims about your company’s customer experience? How about the quality and durability of products, short waits, steady communication, or superior service? An excellent first step toward building customer satisfaction and loyalty is combing through all of your business and marketing claims to ensure that your company is delivering on every claim and promise. While customers will forgive in exceptional situations when they know your company is trying its best, or when external circumstances present difficult challenges, they must know that the effort is there. Promise only as much as your company can deliver. Remember, breaking promises that you continue to promote is a sure way to lose credibility and customers (and gain negative reviews in the process).

Offer superior customer service through multiple channels – especially when things go wrong

When products or services don’t deliver as promised, customers want and deserve a quick and satisfactory resolution to their problems. And since customers have their own communication channel preferences, your company should avail support to them across channels.

Immediate access to phone support is something that winning businesses in every vertical deliver. List your phone number prominently on your site and ensure that customers never hear more than three rings before the system answers.

Similar to phone support in its immediacy, live chat software is a more cost-effective way of improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and conversions. Wait times are usually shorter than with call centers, and the frustration of having to deal with a maze of numeric options is eliminated. Most companies offer live chat on every page of their website.

Maintain social media accounts on the most popular platforms for your customers and check them daily for questions. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are popular platforms, but your customers may be other places. When managed actively, these accounts go far beyond answering questions. They also enable you to provide excellent customer service on a stage for an audience to see, like, and share.

Self-service through FAQs should supplement the above channels, offering answers to the most common consumer issues. It’s also highly cost-effective and will divert a percentage of common problems away from the more expensive channels to maintain.

Build individual customer relationships

Use integrated customer relationship management (CRM) software to organize and manage customer journey data and to improve the customer experience. CRM software tracks your customers’ behavior through all channels and guides them through a sales funnel. In the process, it collects demographics, purchase records, and interaction data to help your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to understand them.

As the volumes of CRM data your company amasses over time grow, new marketing and personalization possibilities emerge. Use detailed analytics and marketing automation to develop more personalized campaigns to smaller segments of your customer base. More personalized messages that resonate with each individual recipient’s interests will generate a greater sense of connection, and will build loyalty and revenue over time. You can also program automation functions to deliver certain types of communications via specified channels, depending on customer behaviors. For example, when a customer leaves the website with an item in their cart, CRM can automate an email promoting that product’s benefits.

Give customers recognition

Humans have a universal need to feel recognized by the groups to which they belong. Smart companies use this knowledge to make customers feel like they are part of an affinity group by shopping with them or being loyal clients. You can use customer recognition in several ways. One is through a loyalty program through which customers accumulate points for their purchases, which incentivizes more buying. Effective loyalty programs result in more revenue and greater market share. Another way is by showing gratitude for purchases by offering unexpected rewards. You can do this through email and SMS text messaging, as well as with print promotions that come inside product or shipment packaging.

Depending on your type of business, you may be directly familiar with some of your customers and their achievements. If customers succeed using your product, consider featuring them in a blog post or video recognizing their achievements, and showing others how your product was helpful. You can also feature them in social media posts, which they’ll be proud to promote to their friends.

All of these tips – and many others used by companies with stellar customer satisfaction scores – boil down to honest, open, and sustained two-way communications. Is your company engaged in an ongoing dialogue through multiple channels? Share your best practices for keeping customers satisfied and loyal with our community on Facebook!