Businesses should never take their customers for granted. In fact, every business should use several tactics to attract and keep a customer or client for a long time. How do you do this? Here are a few suggestions:
- Branding
- Exceptional customer service
- High quality products or services
- Competitive pricing
- Knowing and understanding customer needs
- Loyalty programs
- Stress-free access when trying to reach the business
- Being reliable
- Using social media
Obviously, there are numerous other small ingredients which enable customers to feel valued and important, thus, leading to customer faithfulness.
However, building customer faithfulness or loyalty, does not happen overnight. It involves thoughtful planning, effort, and follow-through. It is also not a stand-alone, one-time activity but takes continuous effort to achieve long-term lasting results.
Never Take Faithfulness for Granted – Customer faithfulness is not only fragile; customer faithfulness is very, very delicate. You can never 100% predict the actions of customers. Customers are fickle, indecisive, changeable, and unpredictable. Just one small change in operations, pricing, customer service, etc. can transform a once loyal customer into having second thoughts about continuing the business relationship or worse yet simply taking their business to a competitor. The instability of customer faithfulness is an important concept for every business to understand. The faithful customer of yesterday and today might very well be gone tomorrow. When that occurs, many times, the business does not even know why the customer left.
Don’t Make Hasty Decisions – While customers might not ever see or even know about what goes on inside the walls of a business, customers will certainly experience external changes that affect their relationship with the business. Keeping this concept in mind, businesses must cautiously consider changes that will directly impact customers and try to anticipate in advance whether such changes will have a positive or negative influence on the continuing relationship.
Although change is normal for any business and certainly required at times, changes affecting the purchase outcome are of paramount importance.
- Will the customer still have a favorable buying experience?
- Will the change in pricing, products, services, operations, or ANY change be of significant importance to the customer?
- Will the change alienate the customer enough to consider switching to one of your competitors?
Allow For Open Dialogue – Depending on the significance of the change being made, keeping the lines of communication open is also very important. Customer faithfulness and the business relationship is not a one-way street. Certain changes that could adversely affect the ongoing business relationship should be communicated in advance with the customer via email, text message, social media, personal interaction, or phone call.
Keep The Ball Rolling – With all the time, effort, and money spent building a successful relationship with a customer, keep the ball rolling in the right direction. Continuously concentrate on customer loyalty and what it takes to continue that successful relationship, while at the same time, understanding and avoiding those elements that can quickly change a loyal customer into a non-customer. Businesses need loyal customers for long-term growth and sustainability…but customer faithfulness is very delicate; therefore, never take customer faithfulness for granted.
