What is Customer Loyalty and How to retain your customers?

What is the most important aspect that helps in creating the brand? Well it’s not how you designed your logo or product or any other things. For creating and maintaining brand every business need the special element known as customer loyalty.

Every companies start their business by promising to provide the value to their customers. But some companies not only provide values but also on this journey they create the huge perception regarding the value they provide not only to the customers but also to their potential customers. They get associated with the customers to become integral part of their lives. Here we have to understand that the value means not only the quality product but also the innovation in terms of new technology, marketing, customer care etc. The big branded companies today were started from the scratch. If we look at the instances of the companies like Apple and Amazon, they were started from a garage and today they are the top companies in terms of market capitalization as well as the customer’s retention.  They have established themselves as the inherent towards daily life of the millions of people.

So what different these companies are doing? What principles these companies are applying? What new things that a business can learn from these companies? Today we are going to dive in this topic.

First of all, we should understand why business needs loyal customer?

• They are the main marketers: In today’s world of social media loyal customers are the great marketers. Any unique way adopted by the business, that they believe creates value are marketed easily in the social media. We can see various creative marketing strategies adopted by the businesses becoming trending in the platforms, ultimately leading towards building or strengthening the brand. These helps in decreasing the huge marketing costs the business bears in other platforms.
• They increase the revenue: we know that word of mouth marketing is highly influential in case of bringing potential customers. Loyal customers recommend their friends, families and others about the product. We have seen that the many of the Apple customers suggesting their friends and families to buy the Apple products because they are quite happy to be associated with the brand and they also want others to be associate with it. Not only this there is strong emotional connection with the brand and any new product that is being launched is happily cheered by the loyal customers and they whole heartedly accept the product.  These helps in the boost of sales of the business.

So now the question arises, how to build the customer loyalty?  

Many businesses use various tools and methods to the build the customer loyalty. Some of the widely accepted practices are as follows.

• Hiring the right personnel: Big branded companies as of today are of belief that they need to look at themselves before looking on the customers. So they tend to hire good personnel that are capable of giving the customer good experience. They ensure that there are competent persons inside the entity that can communicate the ideas that the business has carried.  Hiring the right persons is the basic thing to do by every business.
• Research and development on the customer: Customers behaviours are ever changing with time. Business must try to be in line with the customer’s need and the behaviours. They should initiate and direct the solution of the customer’s problems. When we look at APPLE, they make customer realize that they are facing the certain type of problem and the Apple products are there to solve that problem. Thus, they are directing the customer’s experience. Apple research on the various possible problems and try to solve it by developing/improving their products. Therefore, research and development is essential to build the customer loyalty.
• Training the persons:  We already know that customer’s needs are ever changing and the businesses try to be in line with such needs. Therefore, these businesses also need to train their employees in accordance with the change in time.
• Customer reward programs: Studies show that a customer makes purchase on emotional basis. So it is crucial to appeal the emotions of the customers and that can be done by surprising them by giving rewards that previously went unnoticed. Rewarding helps in creating and strengthening the bond which encourages repeat purchases that boost the profits. Also the customers refer to their family and friends helping in increasing the customer base. But one thing that the business need to make clear is that the customer reward programs should not be focused as short term promotional activities but as the strategic long term activity.
  
  
  
• Collecting feedbacks: Feedbacks are insights given by the customers on the basis of their experience with your company, services or products. It acts as a guide for the improvements that need to be made by the business for the efficient customer experience. If customers are unhappy they let you know through their feedback and the business know the reason why they are unhappy and tries to find the solution. Comments, Suggestions and complaints help in improving the product and experience. Top companies collects and listens to customer feedback and improves product, services and experiences. They gain invaluable insights what the customers expect from them in future. Customer feedbacks also make realise the customers that their opinion are being valued and it creates the emotional bond between the business and the customer.

Every business starts from the scratch and creates Brand in the long run. During this journey various efforts made by the business gets compounded. Branding is the continuous process and the customer loyalty is the part of this. Every effort should be directed towards the improvement of the customer’s experience, customer’s engagement and customer base. This helps in building customer loyalty and increase customer retention rate which ultimately gets associated with strengthening the brand.