Customer Retention: What Customers Want

Marketing strategist and author Steven Howard, in his keynote speech at the DIMENSIONS Marketing & Sales Conference in Melbourne, Australia, explains what customers value and want before they will reward organizations with customer loyalty.

How to Promote Customer Loyalty in 3 Easy Steps?

Customer Loyalty. Among several factors that influences the success of a business, discovering and retaining loyal customers has always got the highest priority. Companies such as Apple, Harley Davidson has got this mantra right and are a hugely successful businesses. Learn how you can create more promoters for your products and services, within the community you serve - ie., your customers.

Step 1: Start from your customer database: I assume you are already in business and are recording your customer contact details. Start to look into your customer database, and relate it to number of products bought by them in the last quarter, number of transactions performed and referrals brought in. Even if your existing system does not have such metrics available, copy and paste the data into Google spreadsheet and enable sorting and you can get these metrics easily. This is a gold mine if done right.

Step 2: Identify loyal customers, take time to talk to them and get feedback: Once you've obtained basic metrics as outlined in step 1, you would know by how, who are your loyal customers. Those who have made highest purchases, repeat purchases, brought referrals (if any), increased wallet share. They are your loyal customers. Go head over heels, pick up the phone (better to be done by the business owner than customer service rep) and talk to them. Get real insights on why he likes your product, make note of them. Don't stop here. Identify those who have made least purchases, least repeat purchases. They are your detractors. Talk to them and get their feedback.

Step 3: Rinse and Repeat: By now, you would know what makes your customers tick and what drives them away. Prioritize the list. Pick the top most and act on it. Rinse and Repeat (go back to step 1). Compare expected vs actual results.

Good luck in wow'ing your customers! Retain them. That's the only way to survive in this bad economy.


By D Sekar

How Promotional Items Increase Customer Loyalty

In general, it's far easier to keep an existing customer than it is to attract a new one. Cultivating a long-term relationship with your customers or customer loyalty is an important part of doing business. After all, it's your return customers who provide close to 80% of your annual sales and business. What's the best way to encourage repeat business and further orders from customers who have bought from you in the past? According to a number of studies in marketing research, customers who receive promotional items as sales incentives return sooner and order more than customers who receive coupons for discounts on their next purchase, and even more than those who receive no acknowledgment at all of their purchases.

Promotional items make wonderful thank you gifts to customers who make a purchase from you. When you send a promotional gift item along with an order, you're letting your customer know that you value their business. That message comes through even more loudly when the promotional thank you gift is sent under separate cover.

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The 17 Costly Marketing Mistakes

I once heard a speaker compare those who engage in marketing as "feeling happy like a dog with its head outside the car window, ears flapping, eyes glazed, and no idea of where he's going."
While I am undoubtedly as proud of my profession as you are of yours, there is one significant difference between marketing professionals and most other professionals -very many of you and other small business owners think it is easy to do what marketing professionals do.

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Asian Words of Knowledge

Words and thoughts are often the great seeds that lead to personal change. They are the building blocks that touch, provoke, arouse, and stir the individual passions and desires that stimulate personal motivation.

Within Asian Words of Knowledge you will find over 600 motivational quotations and phrases from some of Asia's leading thinkers: Buddha, Confucius, Dalai Lama, Mahatma Ghandi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Lao-Tzu, Paramhansa Yogananda, and many others.

These quotations will provide the reader with a wealth of benefits on spiritual guidance, understand ones' self, life, living, success, caring, service to others, and the pursuit of knowledge and learning.

Keeping Good Customers by Earning Customer Loyalty

A goal of every organization is to increase its assets over time. These assets are typically defined in terms of revenue, customer accounts, properties, human resources, and capital.
But there are two hidden assets that every organisation can develop and that are critical for marketing success in the 21st century. These often overlooked and under valued assets are the brands and customers.

I was in Melbourne in mid August last year attending a major meeting of the Australian and New Zealand banks that issue MasterCard credit cards and Maestro debit cards. Mr. Nicholas Utton, Chief Marketing Officer of MasterCard International, had one key
message for this audience of senior bankers concerning customers: "if we don't take care of our customers, someone else will."

That's worth repeating and reflecting on: if we don't take care of our customers, someone else will.

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Making Customer Loyalty Real

Deloitte Research conducted a global manufacturing study in 1999 that resulted in an excellent report titled, “Making Customer Loyalty Real: Lessons from Leading Manufacturers.”

Not only does the report state that “customer loyalty is a critical driver of shareholder value around the world,” it also concludes that “for manufacturers,
low price, high quality, and on-time delivery are no longer enough to stay in the game of global competition.” What is imperative for future success, the study
shows, is “the ability to anticipate and quickly adapt to changing customer demands.”

“Our extensive study of the global manufacturing sector demonstrates that manufacturers must gear their entire organizations — not just their production
operations — to attract profitable customers and retain them for life,” states Deloitte.

“The new game is about shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric focus.”
How do customer-centric manufacturers keep their customers loyal and deliver outstanding financial results? Well, according to Deloitte, the steps include
superior performance in pricing, quality, sales and marketing, and customer service. In other words, the very criteria on which customers base their purchase
decisions.

But there was one other aspect of the Deloitte report I found most fascinating. This had to do with the way in which customer loyalty actually strengthens the
manufacturers’ abilities to deliver on these key criteria. According to their analysis, “customer-centric manufacturers use their tight customer relationships to continually
learn how to optimize investments across the customer interface and delight customers in their next interaction. In this way, customer loyalty creates more
customer loyalty in a self-reinforcing cycle.”

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How Simple (and Human) Is Your Customer Service?

Customer Loyalty and Customer Service: Do you have friends or colleagues who prefer dealing with people rather than machines? My wife is like that. When she needs to know her bank balance or just get some cash, she will go out of her way to talk to a bank teller rather than fumble with an ATM; and she'll always push the button for a "live operator" on an automated telephone service menu.

This doesn't mean that my wife is averse to technology -- she uses email, iPods, cell phones, and the usual array of 21st century devices. But at the same time she is drawn to personal, human customer service and wants it to be part of her life

For the past 20 years, companies have struggled to find the right balance between cost-effective, technologically-enabled approaches to customer service and person-to-person contact. While personal approaches have advantages for many people (like my wife), they require much more training, reduce consistency, and cost more.

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Build Your Customer Experience Roadmap

Companies should obsess about customer needs, not product features.

What makes Barnes & Noble a better brand than Charter Communications--and many others? Customer experience.

Forrester Research recently released its third annual Customer Experience Index. The study ranked 133 US companies across 14 industries using feedback from more than 4,600 consumers. Barnes & Noble came in at the top for the second year in a row, slightly ahead of Marriott Hotels and Hampton Inn. Other winners: Amazon.com and Costco. At the other end of the spectrum, Charter Communications took the bottom spot for the third consecutive year. Also at the bottom: major health care providers such as CIGNA, Aetna, Anthem, Medicaid and United Healthcare.

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3 Ideas For Building Customer Loyalty

Customer service is a natural feedback mechanism that many companies ignore. Over the last several years as new sales dried up, building customer loyalty became in vogue again. Over the past decade, more attention was placed on acquiring new business and thought the customer was a commodity as growth continued. Many organizations were satisfied to lose some of their client base as new customers were plentiful and always walking in the door.

At the same time, customer satisfaction suffered immensely as upper management reduced internal resources, implemented automated phone systems and outsourced departments to other countries.

These strategies increased customer frustration and eventual erosion of their repeat business. Today, things are different. Improving customer satisfaction and loyalty is now a high priority with upper management. Customer retention is a mindset and has to be entrenched within the organization starting at the executive management level.

From the support desk to the receptionist, your customer face should always carry a consistent message of service, quality and willingness to help. If these messages are not conveyed at every level of the organization, your customer will eventually find your competitor and leave.

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Tips on Acquiring Customer Loyalty

For any business to be successful you need more than just a good product or service that you provide. You need to keep your clients coming back to your business for more. How do you do that? I am going to give you tips on acquiring customer loyalty. These tips will help you think about ways to get your customers back to your store time after time, for example through using Loyalty cards.

The number one thing you need to do to keep customers good customer service. By that I mean you must have great communication skills. Make each person who walks into your business your number one concern. Make sure that when they leave your business that they are content, they got what they needed and they will give nothing but raving reviews of your store.

Be available to your customers when they call or email you. Answer each inquiry personally. Listen to their needs and do not promise something that you can not do. That is unprofessional and a huge let down to the customer. Also when someone complains that one of your staff messed up an order, then do what you can to go out of your way to ease the situation and make it right again.

If there are times that you will be out of your office you will need to have a manager act in your place if there is a problem, or a client just needs help with merchandise. One thing you can do after you have helped this person with finding something in the store or whatever the case may be is to give a small free gift. Just slide it in the back and later when the client opens the bag they will be surprised, and want to come back to shop at your shop again.

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