Companies often focus on retaining customers by offering incentives to come back instead of providing continual quality service to begin with. One of the easiest ways to fail to retain customers is to provide poor and/or inconsistent quality of service. After one very poor experience, damage control is often out of the question. Instead of looking for increasingly clever incentives for existing customers, focus on keeping existing customers happy. Often the secret to customer retention is ensuring not to anger the people who already patronize your business.
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Quality control
Existing customers exist for a reason. Primarily, they like how things are run. When interacting with major credit card or insurance companies via phone, customers expect a certain level of service. For example, when purchasing car insurance, most customers want to purchase car insurance, not talk about the weather. After a company has set a certain standard of competency, customers expect to receive the same standard of service for each individual interaction. Ensure that quality is consistently above par to retain customers.
In a brick and mortar environment, customers thrive on consistency. People like to know what to expect. The weekend staff must be at the same level as the weekday staff. Customers might find it troublesome if one set of staff is better and faster than the other. However, the biggest deal breaker in the customer-store relationship is poor, rude service. No customer wants to be berated when attempting to purchase stamps at a grocery store or belittled by a barista in front of a crowd. A personal attack or insult by an employee or representative of the store is one of the best ways to ensure that a customer will drive an extra mile to patronize a nearly identical business.
The best safeguard against driving existing customers away is to implement clear and concise procedures and expectations for all employees. It is not a customer’s responsibility to report a rude employee to management. It is the management’s responsibility to know what is going on by implementing appropriate measures.
Shift your focus from bribery to consistency
You have customers for a reason. The “real” reason why they keep coming back is not as important as implementing standards to ensure that they keep coming back. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Instead of offering small incentives or confusing rewards programs, shift your focus from bribery to consistent, repeatable, testable customer service and/or product delivery. The goal is to deliver a loyalty experience that goes above and beyond expectations and competitors.
When you have to make changes to keep customers
There are a number of business arenas in which making additions is crucial to keeping customers happy. For instance, if all of your competitors have a system by which customers can purchase items or pay for a service via an online platform or portable POS system, you might want to upgrade as well. Keeping up with the times is a necessary part of almost all types of commerce. For example, fewer people would be interested in purchasing a dial-up internet connection today compared to ten years ago. Although staying current should be a given, the key to keeping existing customers is consistency, repeatability, and testability. If you get lucky, your customers will hate your competition. You might not have to be best friends with existing customers, but you absolutely cannot risk losing their loyalty and trust.
