Customer loyalty is one of the most important aspects of a business entity. A business is incomplete without its customers. Customers give validation to a business and they are the success what a business strives. Without potential customers, it is impossible to run a business. You need to have that support to get on the success path. It is a proven fact that holding on to customer loyalty is getting difficult with passing time. In the mad era of technological advancement, thousands of new companies are opening up every year. According to a recent survey on decreasing customer loyalty, it was found out that, only 13 percent of the customers are tending to stay loyal to a single brand. This survey showed that 87 percent of the customers preferred to shop around and 58 percent said to have changed their brand choices consecutively.
What could be the possible reason that people like to shop around and choose different brands each time a new one comes up? Why they get attracted to competitor’s products and services? It is high time that you take a closer look at your business and more importantly your customers.
Importance of customer loyalty
Gaining customer or brand loyalty is as important as your business entities. Thousands of benefits that lies under the covers of customer loyalty. When the marketers discuss upon the pointers of loyalty, they often suggest certain measurable metrics including sales increase, conversion rate, and enrolment increase. If all these factors are high in number, then it is easily suggestible that your business has successfully conquered the brand loyalty of potential customers. However, these factors do not narrate the whole customer loyalty Pictionary.
The conversion rate can determine the number of visitors that you have converted into sales, but they cannot show you the whole picture of whether your customers are captivated with your products and services. The conversion rate cannot determine whether your customers have developed trust in your brand or whether they are willing to purchase again. To truly see and understand the customer loyalty you need to look way beyond these conventional metrics. Some of the significant benefits of customer loyalty are discussed below:
Endorsing of the brand
This occurs when your customers become brand advocates. They become so diligently in tune with your brand that they go out of their way in promoting your brand without expecting any compensation on their part from the company. They start doing their branding through Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. and direct referrals.
Ignorance on the high rise
This is a situation when the customers become very insensitive about the price rates of your brand. Here the customers are likely to purchase your product even if the price increases considerably. The customers trust your brand with their whole and they buy your stuff no matter what the price rates you apply.
Unchanging referrals to new customers
These referrals are new customers that are advised to use your products by customers that are already satisfied with your brand. This has a positive impact on your business and this has a direct link with the increase in sales. There are no additional charges for advertising to such customers, and they buy your products even if you do not invest in engaging them in your products. Simply put, this is an easy sale without any extra advertising or promotion.
Constant support from valued customers
Potential customers will listen to you anyway. You can communicate through email and they will directly respond to your offers you provide them. In this way, you can convince them of re-sales and even establish customer relationships.
Predictability of the future business ventures
If you a loyal base of customers, you can easily predict your sales for the year. This will help you determine the pointers that you need to increase your considerably.
Customer retention and its problems
What does it exactly mean to retain your customers? These statistics are generally defined as the percentage of long-term clients of a company. The long-term clients are more important than short-term customers because the reason being very obvious that is they tend to spend more money, costs way less for advertising the products, and they tend to make references of the company which fetches the business more valued customers. As they are familiar with the products, they feel to spend their money on the products and they enjoy doing so. Short-term clients might purchase the product for one time and then not return. This is the reason it costs less money to advertise through long-term customers.
Read more on the importance of customer loyalty.
Customer retention problems
There are certain things that you do that takes upsets your customers and make them dissatisfied with your brand services. In this way, you run the risk of losing customers. Customer retention is a worthy investment that a company makes. Retaining your old customers is much more important than getting new ones. If you can retain your old customers, you will have a potential customer that will have your back for a long time.
However, companies tend to draw away customers because of their poor customer retention abilities. Here are some of the major reasons why customer loyalty tends to fall back:
Mediocre customer service: Almost about 82 percent of the people have stopped using the product and services of the companies due to low-quality customer service. Customer service is the string that keeps your customer and the company connected. Therefore, you must have an efficient customer service team that can serve your clients sincerely and significantly.
Ignorance of customer appreciation: About 53 percent of people have switched to some other company because they felt unappreciated despite their continuous support. You must let your customers know that you are grateful for having them and they have been a great support in the success of the company. There are two reasons you do so: one because they really are the support systems of your business, and secondly to make them feel special like an old customer that had your back for the longest period.
Ignorance of customer needs and preferences: Most of the time companies fail to respond to customer complaints at a certain time. Often customer complaints are ignored and that what makes the customers switch to other brands that go well with their needs and preferences. You must take your customer’s tastes and preferences into account. As a customer, they need to feel valued and appreciated from time to time.
Some unexpected issues: Sometimes customers can run into problems that they were not expecting while signing up with your products and services. This probably leads to frustration and the customers tend to leave and switch brands.
So how do you plan to stop your customers from leaving you? You need to analyze the reason and come up with strategies that will effectively help you combat in customer retention. However, these strategies do not have to be complicated always, you can always come up with something subtle and it can work too. To acquire the long-term clients there are few easy strategies you can employ:
- Always provide support to your customers under any circumstances. They need to know that you are always available to answer questions or solve problems they may be having.
- Survey your customers. Measure customer satisfaction, ratings, and handle shortcomings. Make sure to require a reasoning section for cancellations or downgrades. You need to know why the customers are unhappy to the point of cancellation.
- It is beneficial to provide discounts for your long-term customers when and where it is possible. Show them that their support has been instrumental in your business and it is your gift to them as customers.
Reasons for losing customers
There are several reasons that companies do to fail at customer services. Here are critical areas that should be considered.
Customer service problems
- There is no clear definition of what customer service looks like in the organization: You cannot just assume that you will give great customer services only if you decide to give so. You have to define what it is and how it looks, like and most importantly, what you want your customers to experience. It has to be crystal clear. A phrase goes “Always keep your customer first” should be the mantra of your company. Every employee should preach the same and the session should be ongoing.
- Good people are in the wrong jobs: A customer service starts with the people and there are plenty of good people out there. However, some of them are not suited for a truly customer-focused organization. It begins by employing the right personnel for the right job. Make sure the current employees buy into the customer service definition and are ready and willing to be a part of the initiative.
- There is a lack of proper training: Training is not something that you do one time. It is not something that gains from orientation only. It is an ongoing effort. The best companies have ongoing training and follow-ups to keep customer service at maximum importance.
- They tend to treat customer service more like a department: For a focused culture to work, everyone has to be aware of how they influence the customer’s experience. Customer service is not a department but a philosophy to be embraced by every employee from the CEO to the most recently hired.
- They treat employees in a certain way and expect the employees to treat customers a different way: This does not work. The behaviour of leadership and management towards employees is incongruent with the customer service initiative. The remedy is to treat your employees as you want them to treat customers and maybe even better.
Product and services quality-related problems
The products and services that your company produced are much less in quality than it was anticipated. As your products fail to meet the expectations of your clients, they tend to share their dissatisfaction with their friends who were most likely to become your new customers. Now, you not only lose your current customers but also blow off your new customers. Some angry customers may also take their dissatisfaction with social media. They can post a negative review about your products or services, which will affect your business globally and you might start losing customers from around the globe. The remedy here is to produce and design quality products that would exceed the expectations of your customers. You can also strategize your marketing tools and ventures.
You were not able to showcase the actual value
Customers pay for the product with an expectation of receiving equivalent value from it. It is not always important that you have the cheapest prices. Customers do not always go for the price but also value. The value of the product should do justice to its price rate. Customer service has nothing to do with the price rates but the value that is being conveyed to them. This is the reason why Apple products dominate the market when it comes to smartphones. About 87 percent of the industry is been captured by the Apple association and only 18 percent of the other brands. Customers are buying apple products despite their high price rate because they are getting the exact value from it. The only remedy is to determine your unique value proposition. You have to identify what unique you can do with your business to fetch as many customers as possible.
Inconsistent business
Not only in business but also life consistency matters a lot. The things that consistent over a long period can be easily relied upon. Moreover, things that can be easily relied upon do not need any worry. Inconsistency with your branding procedure can lead to failure. If you use your company’s logo and name in a different way and pattern while promoting can mislead your customers and can lead to confusion. Moreover, inconsistency when it comes to the quality of the product and services drives away the customer more. The remedy to this is to provide a proper customer guide to your employees, educate all your employees on branding and give them p[roper information about the industrial ventures, educate them, on customer retention and repeat sales, and the most important part is to build a strong customer relationship.
Old sales tactics
In this mad era of technological advancement, everyone tends to move faster and if you miss a little thing, it can leave way behind. When it comes to customer tactics, aggressive ways are not going to work. It will drive away customers than bringing them in. aggressive ways like dragging prospects all through the monotonous sales process, nagging into the purchase, etc. These ways used to work before because people had very fewer options when it came to certain products and services and that is the reason people used t6o put up with aggressive ways. Nevertheless, it is very different. Customers have thousands of options from which they can choose that is most suited for them. The remedy here is to build a strong relationship with customers and train the sales personnel on how to pursue the customers in a way that came very subtle and not aggressive.
Conclusion
Customers are the most important part of your company. You should always focus on keeping them happy and satisfied. Knowing how to convert a one time visitor to a lifetime customer can be a game-changer for your business. There are so many ways that might seem little for you but it might turn out to be that taboo that turns your business upside down. If you want to see that light of success, you need to focus more on your customers and the reasons behind decreasing customer loyalty. Plan strategies that work best with your customers and put them to test accordingly. Every successful business knows the worth of valuable customers. They can lead the business to a marvelous height. Without having customer loyalty your business cannot reach the peak of success. Gaining customer loyalty is one of the most important aspects of a business. It is very important that you set up a loyal customer base with proper engagement. Customer loyalty is the key to success. It is so important to have your customers come back to you, send you referrals, and write good reviews. If these things happen, your business is going to blow up.