Customer Retention

A Comprehensive Look on How to Create Patrons for Your Company – Part 1

Customer loyalty is what every company craves for, every business wants its customers to revisit and buy their products or services to generate long time revenue. However, the greatest hurdle all companies face is customer retention. According to Accenture, 78% of the consumers they asked are going back on brand loyalty more than ever.

The concept of a customer is a lifetime patron is long gone, and no company can achieve it pragmatically. Loyal customers preferring your products or services will become advocates for your brand. In the two-part blog series, we will holistically discuss how to convert the visitors or infrequent customers into loyal patrons.

While modern businesses can strive for customer loyalty, achieving it is something rare. Therefore, we will talk about essential aspects for a business to turn customers into fans. As part of the first blog, we will talk about four quintessential topics here.

Data consolidation for a single customer view

The interaction customer has with the brand directly or indirectly must be analyzed to understand the mood and nature of the interaction. Businesses need to integrate analytics into their system to seek dumps of customer interaction data and slice and dice the data to bring out insightful information that will help provide better services to the customers.

Big data should be consolidated using computer algorithms to build an individual customer profile and their perspective or experience with the brand. Once the company arrives at understanding the customer experience, the business can focus its efforts on retaining the customer by resolving any concerns.

Comprehend social media engagements

Customers today are not voicing their opinions directly to the business about the brand, product, or service. Therefore, companies today can’t wait for customers to approach them directly. But, businesses must look out for avenues where consumers or customers supposedly vent out their opinions about the brand or its products.

The companies must implement active data collection and analysis via big data, machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence to predict customer experience and take corrective measures much before they approach you for solutions. Thus, businesses must always dedicate their resources toward scourging customer reviews and opinions about the brand from the social media channels.

Don’t forget to have a personal touch

In this day and age, where everything is automated, customers hardly find any interaction with humans – when it comes to interacting with a brand. Most of the time, they end up talking to a chatbot or having a one-way dialogue with IVR automated responses. Although all these systems can perform much efficiently than humans in most of the tasks, customers still prefer a human touch when engaging with a brand.

For example, big brands like Apple, Samsung, etc. provide offline services too via Genius bar – where human interaction is still present and customers can be engaged humanly for better retention and upselling.

Never ditch the customers post-purchase

The immediate goal of any company or brand is to generate sales revenue by selling more products or services. However, it is the post-purchase experience that retains or drives away the customer. A bad customer experience after sales is one of the biggest triggers that will chase away the customer from the brand. Therefore, having robust after-sales support is key for your brand’s success.

These are the first four quintessential aspects of turning customers into fans over time. These points should not be looked individually, but rather have to be considered in tandem with other aspects of customer retention. The list is far from over and does keep an eye out for our second part of the blog that will reveal other key points for better customer retention.