Encouraging Customer Loyalty By Offering Superior Service
24 Mar 2014
Regardless of what your current marketing objectives may be, one goal that many of you will have is to increase customer loyalty. For some this strategy simply revolves around being cheaper than anyone else. On the surface this makes sense, I mean surely everyone loves a bargain?!
But this strategy is fraught with danger. If you are being as cheap as you can possibly be, it means that you are probably keeping your profit margins wafer thin. What if your suppliers increase their prices? Or what about when someone comes along who is even cheaper than you are?
And whilst cheapness is often one criteria that is used to encourage consumers, quality can be just as important. The concept of quality starts and finishes long before and after the actual transaction has taken place. It can come in shape of training videos on the web. It might mean offering a try before you buy – testing a product in-store for free, or running a free software trial with no strings attached. Often in today’s day and age it means offering high quality customer service post-sale with a friendly, professional support team. Of course the product or service you offer has to reflect the quality and not get left behind the competition’s offerings.
Here are a couple of ways in which a CRM solution can help:
Getting Personal – CRM lets you hold all the information you need that is relevant to your customer base, and link it through the various modules. By looking up a contact record, you can review purchase histories and get an idea if they need any help or advice on how to get the most out of your products and services.You don’t need to waste your client’s time by asking for information which they have already given you as it is all held on the system.
Staying On Track – whether in your communications or customer journey. Again CRM can be used to store email templates, PDFs and other documents to which customer data can be merged, to offer information in a consistent fashion. You can also use the system to track the customer journey, and to generate alerts to let you know when the next stage of the customer journey is due, for example sending follow-up information and advice, or alerting a customer when a contract is due for renewal.
Establishing and building your reputation as a provider of great service is a real incentive to encourage loyal customers that will return to you time and time again.
My role is to build our Customer Success team and I work with our clients and prospects helping them get the most from their subscription – it is a fun challenging role as no two days are the same. When not in the office I’ll be either making a noise on my guitar or getting my trainers on for a run out in the Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors or the Lake District.