Customers are the lifeline of a company. While customer acquisition is how a business forms its foundation, customer retention is what determines the business’s growth in this competitive market. Customer satisfaction, therefore, fuels the long-term success of a business and is, therefore, an extremely crucial realm for businesses to tap into.
Acquiring customers requires a lot of hard work and expenses. Therefore, working towards retaining them is equally important.
Customer experience drives retention and consequently, profit. In fact, it has been found that a 5% increase in retention rates accelerates the profit of a business by a startling 25% to 95%. Additionally, if your clients are satisfied with the services your business provides, then you already have a free pass to word-of-mouth promotions.
With clients being the biggest assets of your business, devising the right strategies to improve customer satisfaction will ensure retention. Let’s take a look at the ones that actually work.
#1. Know Your Customers
Knowing your customers goes well beyond their names, age and locations. It is when you start knowing their interests and tastes that you get an idea of how the services provided by your business can actually help them. An insight into what your buyer wants opens up a goldmine of opportunities. You can revise your business strategies and decisions around their requirements to deliver a positive buying experience to your customers.
The right information will help you collect the right data to initiate customer engagement. There are scores of ways to know your customers well. You can concentrate on the web analytics, behavioral data, customer profiles and so on to obtain what you are looking for.
#2. Offer Personalized Services
The revenue of every business boils down to its customers. A business’s success is mirrored by how the customers are treated. We all like to be treated as individuals. This is why personalized service scores big time to improve loyalty.
The easiest and the most effective way to implement this is by lending a voice to your brand. Ensure that your customers do not end up talking to an automated machine. Apart from that, shopping assistance and sending customized messages and offer notifications according to the customers’ needs and habits can work to your business’s advantage.
A one-to-one experience for your customers will help add relevance to their purchases and can engage your visitors well.
#3. Provide Product Training and Customer Service
Helping your customers understand how a product works is vital. Product training and support should be designed to ensure that customers obtain maximum value from the product. When people spend money on purchasing something, they tend to doubt their ability to understand how the product works. A constant assistance to guide them through the product helps in easing this doubt considerably. When such guidance accompanies every purchase, your customers will begin to trust your brand immensely.
It has been found that 76% of consumers use customer service as a tool to measure how much a company values them.
Customers always have certain expectations regarding post-purchase support. This can extend up to the entire lifetime of the product. When you identify and meet these expectations accurately, you build a responsible image of your brand among your customers. This plays a major role in impacting sale.
#4. Turn to Social Media
Did you know that over 75% of Internet users are on social media? Chances are, a large part of that comprise your customers too. Social media is an effective channel for customers to share their experiences with your company. Therefore, social media serves as a goldmine of customer reviews and recommendations. You would need to keep track of these to ensure that your customers are satisfied with the services your business provides.
You can use social media to:
- Monitor customers’ reactions to your services
- Keep track of your brand mentions and feedback
- Provide constant support to your customers
- Engage your customers through activities like contests, quizzes etc.
Here’s an interesting fact: In a study conducted on 24,000 consumers connected via social media, 71% of the respondents said that they trust product recommendation on Facebook more than those on other social media platforms.
#5. Leverage Free WiFi
Internet-on-the-go has become an important part of our everyday lives. Today, people expect to stay connected wherever they are. The same for your business premises. When your clients are visiting your office, you can serve them better by offering free WiFi. Apart from meeting customer expectations and acquiring new customers, this will also help you keep a tab on customer activity and send them personalized offers.
62% of businesses have stated that offering free WiFi to customers encourages them to stay on the premises longer and shop more. Businesses that have used free WiFi have reported 79% success rates.
#6. Provide Additional Benefits
Who doesn’t like added benefits? Or, a special offer once in a while? Surprising your customers with a free goodie unexpectedly can go a long way in building concrete relationships.
Sometimes, an unanticipated discount on the products your customers have been eying for some time can work. On other events, you can consider throwing in an additional accessory or a week’s worth post-purchase support for free.
You would be amazed at how effective these little things can be in building a positive image of your brand. It helps in increasing customer satisfaction immensely.
#7. Have a Feedback Strategy in Place
Customer experience is the most valuable aspect of a business. There can be no better way of understanding customer experience than having a feedback system. This post-purchase follow-up can be carried out through surveys or through talking to them directly over chat or phone. These insights will help you identify any concerns or complaints that your customers may have regarding the services and/or products and devise strategies to serve them better.
Communication and responsiveness can make or break a brand’s image. Therefore, you need to maintain an online and offline presence for customer satisfaction. Understand your customer’s perspective and implement strategies based on what works. Remember, it is always wise to treat your customers the way you want to be treated.
Images: ”customer satisfaction concept on blackboard /Shutterstock.com“
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