“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy.”
Michael LeBeouf, an American business author could not be more right. The customer is often considered the ultimate boss since it can solely drive a company and its revenues. Knowing this, every business owner should work keeping in mind customers’ best interests when improving a product or a service.
Here are the best 5 sure shot ways to ensure customer loves your product and come back time to time and again.
Know your ideal customers
If you wish to get your customers to buy your products, know what they want just the way they want it, you have to first find out what it is they expect in the product. For that, you must first know your customer.
Start with a set of clear-cut profiles of your ideal customers. Ideal customer profiles help you get to know the basic demographics, fears, desires, and needs of each segment of your market. This is essential to building a loyal customer base and to find a better natural fit for your brand. This will also help you vet out ‘problem’ profiles of clients which in turn will further reduce complaints from clients.
Creating and attracting a loyal customer base is much easier when you start by defining your ideal customers. According to the famous Pareto principle aka 80/20 rule which says 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales. This applies equally to large and small businesses. So listen to what your customers’ say, even if it is a small but loyal group of customers.
Know what the customer expects
A big number of negative feedback boils down to unmet expectations. This could be due to various reasons such as outside factors that are outside of your control or the miscommunication on your part regarding customer expectations. Whatever the reason is, as a product owner, you have to make sure to do away with the dissatisfaction at the earliest. The key to managing expectations with a new customer or client is to be thorough and honest before the purchase of the product made by the customer.
Think “full disclosure,” keeping in mind that what’s important to them may not be marked important to you. This will give you a chance to approach this from your customer’s perspective to ensure your customer satisfaction to the fullest. Engage with your customer on a personal level so that they believe you and your brand value.
Another crucial technique is to under-promise and over-deliver. This strategy has seemed worked wonders for a variety of businesses and startups and has kept negative feedback at bay!
Authenticity goes a long way
While interacting with clients, maintain authenticity. This is because, in this digital era, no customer is naïve and cannot be hoodwinked with pretenses and promises. Also, if you want them to be your loyal customer and build brand loyalty, you have to deliver truth every single time. If your customers feel that they have been played, they will take their money and purchases elsewhere.
The KLT principle: KLT stands for Know, Like, and Trust and it’s the secret to getting more customers and more repeat buyers for your business and the best part is it’s free!
According to the KLT principle, three steps to getting more people to buy from you:
- Help them Know you
- Let them Like you, and
- Earn their Trust
If you ensure these three things, you will see your brand value increasing along with brand loyalty and trust.
Customer is no less than Royalty
Did you know bad customer experiences cost US businesses $41 billion a year?
According to a survey, 82% of consumers left a brand solely for a bad customer experience which is a clear indication of how customer relationship is of utmost importance. Furthermore, 58% of these experiences were shared with friends and family thus losing out not one but many potential customers.
Therefore, treat your customers like royalty. Good customer service includes a simple response, as quickly as possible, to every single question or complaint you receive. Failing to respond will only worsen the scenario.
As much as excellent customer service experiences go viral on occasion, accounts of bad customer service can be very damaging and are much more likely to gain crowd attention. This deteriorates the loyalty program, and one can observe customer retention dipping critically and drastically.
Transparency is the Key
Customers appreciate transparency more than anything else. Being more open about your products, prices and results will set you up for success. This will also help keep at bay unrealistic expectations of the product or service.
However, transparency doesn’t mean you opening your books to someone (a business must have an appropriate amount of confidentiality) but rather letting the customer in on the process of product and service and thus giving them a realistic overview of what to expect of the product in what time and of what quality.
Contrary to popular belief, honesty and transparency don’t kill sales. Potential clients like being told about what a company can and can’t do for them. If you don’t over-promise, you’re less likely to underdeliver. The result? An industry-leading client retention rate and happy customers whose goals are met.
The above-mentioned points can help you build a loyal clientele who will be faithful to your brand for years. The secret of building trust among your brand and customer lies in acknowledging a mistake, addressing it, and solving it. This convinces the customer that you respect their time and investment in your company. In the business vernacular, there is a common saying which is “respect thy customer” because then and only then the customer will fall in love with your business and come back again and again.
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