You’ve all experienced the surprise and delight of being treated like a valued customer. There’s no better feeling than being pampered when buying a new pair of shoes, or being attended to when trying to find cold medicine at the pharmacy. On the flip side, there’s no worse feeling than being pushed too hard, ignored or even unnoticed when you are ready to buy.
Do Unto Others…
Staying attentive to your customer’s needs is a tough and delicate balance, and it is key to achieving your customers’ approval and earning their loyalty. Treating your customers like they’re made of gold is an important layer in the foundation of building your own loyalty strategy.
To win your customers’ confidence – and eventually their loyalty – there’s a prerequisite needed: tactfully demonstrate that each customer is valued and then treat them as such. While it’s vitally important to invest in your top tier of customers, it’s equally important to place value on all customers.
Treat your customers like they’re made of gold, and they will return that special treatment back to you in repeat business. They’ll also be more likely to refer your business. The ultimate goal in business is to earn your customers’ trust and capture their lifelong loyalty. Here are some tips to do so:
• Treat all customers equally
• Value each customer, as each contributes to your bottom line
• Show appreciation for all purchases, large and small
• Have a formal process in place to personally thank customers for their business
• Consider how your business can begin to reward loyal customers for their continued patronage.
The reason you’re in business is to grow you customer base and increase profits. Every business strives to capture more market share. Making modifications in how you treat your new and existing customers can be the most cost-effective way to increase profits. So before you initiate or enhance a customer loyalty strategy, it’s important that the organization’s entire team adopts a “golden rule” policy to treat each and every customer as they would want to be treated.
If you continue to exceed customers’ expectations, and your company has a fundamental practice of valuing each customer, you will achieve exceptional customer loyalty.
Know Your Customers
It’s surprising the high percentage of companies that do not know – or care to know – who their customers are. Many companies simply see customers as dollar signs and avoid any personal connection beyond the transaction.
One of the most basic practices of any business should be to know your customers, or you won’t have a business. You don’t need to know the name of every person who enters your stores, but you should have tools in place to be able to gain some intelligence about your customers in order to effectively service or up-sell them. Learning more about your customers will help build better relationships that lead to increased business.
Treating your customers like they’re made of gold will yield allegiance, devotion, commitment, support, promise, dedication and loyalty.
