Anyone with a real head for business knows the value of a happy consumer base. Happy customers don’t return your product, or cancel their subscription. They might tell their friends about you, or write a positive review online or in print. Understanding that value is easy, but not everyone understands all the moving parts involved if you want to avoid losing customers loyalty. We’ll discuss a few of the things you can do to avoid losing customers loyalty in this article, starting at the beginning with a firm foundation and moving through the buyer/seller relationship and the changes and pitfalls you may encounter.
The seeds of customer loyalty starts at moment one, so to avoid losing customers loyalty you need to be considering their satisfaction from the very beginning. Does your advertisement rely on methods that may leave a buyer predisposed to dissatisfaction, despite having made the purchase? Many salespeople forget that there is a phase to the buying cycle AFTER the purchase.
If you haven’t laid positive groundwork and confirmed the purchase as a positive after the close, you’ve already messed up. If you want to avoid losing customers loyalty, your customers should never feel they’ve tricked, fast-talked, or otherwise manipulated into a bad purchase. Good salespeople will create at least some bond with the customer before the purchase; if the customer likes the person they bought from, they will feel good about the purchase, and come back for more.
Maintaining that bond is important. Whether with an individual sales person or with your company as an entity, to avoid losing customers loyalty you should build a positive experience wholly independent of your product. A bad product will, of course, ruin loyalty in a heartbeat, but if your company relies wholly upon high product quality for customer loyalty, you are one bad release or competitor advance from disaster. If you run a company customers enjoy buying from, however, you will weather such storms easily.
Of course, no matter how great your relationship with your buyers may be, you cannot avoid losing customers loyalty if you fall behind the product curve. If your competition offers something, you cannot, even your most steadfast supporters will try their product-and if that company has done a decent job, you can’t avoid losing customers loyalty to some degree.
Therefore, to maintain customer loyalty, you need to keep an eye on the future. That means innovating. You have a good relationship with your customers, so listen to what they need, want, and think of ways to give it to them. Nothing helps a company avoid losing customers loyalty like innovation. If that fails, however, you must at the very least keep abreast of the competition. That means paying attention to what everyone else in the business-directly and tangentially-is up to.
So long as you keep up, and stay the business customers WANT to buy from, you will effortlessly avoid losing customers loyalty and build a base that can survive the inevitable downturns that might destroy a company ignoring customer loyalty.
Claire has 4+ years of experience in sales and recruitment. As a Director of Client Services, her main objective is to connect great people to great companies by building strong relationships with both top clients and candidates in the sales industry. She specializes in sales roles of all seniority levels for both enterprise and start-up clients North American wide. When Claire isn't networking with top talent, she enjoys being outdoors, traveling and spending time with friends & family.