Retain Customers

Customers are the most important part of any business. Your customers are your lifeline to profits, respect, and reputation. No business can survive without customer retention, but it can be hard work learning how to keep them coming back for more of your services or products. You can learn how to adapt to your customers needs and wants, practice basic customer service, and take the next step to keep them coming back.

Steps

Adapting to Your Customers

  1. Learn what your customers want. If you want customers to return to your business again and again, it's important that you learn to read your customer base and understand what you offer the market. Why would people choose your place of business over others? Customers return to businesses for one, and hopefully more, of three basic reasons:
    • The perception that your business offers a deal.
    • The perception that your business offers a service or product that they can't get elsewhere.
    • The perception that your business treats its customers well.
  2. Know who you are and what you offer. Learning to market yourself appropriately and tailor your business to a customer base requires a certain amount of harsh honesty and self-evaluation. Businesses that come off as having identity crises, or an inflated sense of their product are unlikely to succeed. Do you need to modernize? Do you need to stay consistent to avoid losing customers who like your vintage flair? It depends on you and your business.
    • If you're selling proverbial popsicles in a proverbial Antarctica, it's important to acknowledge that as a challenge that you need to overcome in your business strategy. How can you adapt to develop a more marketable product, or find the market for the product you already make?
    • Compare your product with the competition, and scout them. Putting up a sign that says, "Best coffee in town!" is one thing, but how does your coffee compare with the coffee across town, really? If it really is the best in town, price it accordingly. If not, you need to market it based on value.
  3. Keep the quality of your product or service consistent. Most people will try anything once. But to go back, the product or service needs to be especially good, and the customer needs to be sure it will be the same day in and day out. The quality of your service and the value of your offering is far more important than any other aspect of your business. Simply put, customers must like and know they can trust your product, or they will not buy it again, no matter how attentive your staff, no matter how clean your store, and no matter how cheap the product.
    • Establish strict quality standards and implement ways to keep those standards in place. If you make food, the sandwich needs to be the same on Monday as on Friday, if an experienced employee is making it, or a new worker.
  4. Collect feedback from customers. For any growing business, it's important to do first-hand research into your customers likes and dislikes in regard to your business. Provide feedback cards or e-mail customers to learn about how your business is succeeding, and how it could improve.[1]
    • Maintain customer complaint records to provide an accurate measure of the types of issues that arise, frequency of complaints and feedback received. In some instances complaints may decrease as the product or service improves.
    • If complaints about the same issues come up again and again, then it is time to brainstorm and experiment with methods to further improve the business.
  5. Pay attention to your online reputation. These days, business sink or swim based on what people are saying on Yelp and other social networking platforms, especially in larger cities where the competition is increasingly fierce. You may think you're doing everything you can to appeal to customers, but don't ignore your reputation online. Join in and connect with customers, and learn from their more anonymous feedback.
    • Business that hope to succeed must have a functional and professional website. Your website should make people feel like they absolutely need to have your product or service, and provide basic information about your hours and products.
    • Don't write fake reviews, however strong the temptation may be. If people are saying bad things about your business online, that's your fault. Make changes to your business instead.
  6. Be willing to adapt to your market. Different businesses will need to follow their customers, not any generalized rules for retaining customers. A gluten-free speciality bakery in Los Angeles needs to follow entirely different standards and practices than a road-side diner in Montgomery, AL, because the customer base will have entirely different expectations, standards, and interests.
    • If you offer a high-end product or a specialty service–something that appeals to a smaller niche market–you have to make sure your business is located somewhere with a high concentration of that market, or a way of attracting it. The quality of your product and the value for money will be the most important part of retaining customers.
    • If you offer a product with wide appeal, something available at more than one place, then your marketability, your consistency, and your customer service will be the most important parts of your customer retention.

Practicing Good Customer Service

  1. Train your employees to treat customers with respect. It's important for employees to understand their role in customer retention. Your employees are sometimes the only contact your customer has with your business, so be sure that your employees have the same respect and treatment of your customers as you would yourself.
    • Develop training manuals and methods that appeal to varied learning types of the employees, incorporating video, reading, and even customer service role-play into your training routine.
    • Designate a more seasoned employee to mentor the new employees.
    • Offer your employees incentives such as “employee of the month” or “customer favorite” to gain their interest in treating customers well.
  2. Set regular and accessible hours. If your business is open Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and every other Tuesday from 1:45 to 3:00 and 9:00pm to midnight, you're going to struggle to retain customers. Don't make it impossible to remember when you're open. Adapt to your customers and be open when they require your services.
    • Keep in mind the average working week. If you're only open from 10a-3pm, Monday through Friday, people who work a regular 9-5 job will never be able to shop at your place. Consider staying open later, or opening on the weekends.
  3. Be flexible. If you serve breakfast until 10:30 and a customer comes in at 11:00 wanting the pancakes, it can be a tricky situation. You don't want to back your kitchen up and compromise your service just as they're shifting over for the lunch rush, but you also want to keep your customer happy. What do you do? Be as flexible as possible, given the situation.
    • Let your customer know that you're doing them a favor in as friendly and genuine a tone as possible. "We technically stop serving breakfast at 10:30, so it might take a bit longer, but we'll have that right up for you. Deal?"
  4. Settle disputes in a timely manner. Customer issues do arise from time to time. How you handle this dispute will determine if you lose a customer or retain them.
    • Listen to what your customer has to say about the issue at hand. Be sure to hear them out before making a conclusion.
    • See if there is some way to appease your customer in order to have them happy to return to your business.
    • Settle disputes amicably and with a positive attitude. Let the customer know you are more than happy to make them satisfied.
  5. Learn to sell truthfully. The customer must not only trust the product, they must trust what you have to say about the product, how you present it to them. The customer is looking to you to produce for them real reasons why the product will fulfill a need.
    • Coach your staff to seek more information from the customer about how the customer plans to, or wishes to, use the product in a sales environment. Use probing questions to put the spotlight on the customer, showing a personal interest in who they are and what they do.
    • Up-selling can be an important part of any business environment, but only insofar as it doesn't become obvious to customers. Nobody wants to be badgered with prompts to buy extra things they clearly don't need.
  6. Make your business clean and welcoming. There's no right way to design and organize a store. What may make one customer feel at home may turn another off. But one thing that's consistent is that your store needs to be cleaned every day and organized in a professional and welcoming way. Whatever style you go with, modern, vintage, homey, or elegant, you need to keep it consistent and clean.

Going the Extra Mile

  1. Form real relationships with your customers. Customers like shopping and being recognized or remembered for what they like. Even if another place has a better product, some customers are willing to shop at places they're treated better.
    • Learn your customers names and greet them. Customers like to feel like they are important and something as simple as knowing their name or what specific product they like can make all the difference in how often they choose to return to your business.
    • There are no "small" customers. Treat everyone who walks in the store as if they're about to drop a thousand bucks on your top shelf goods, then turn around and do it again. Then work on making that true.
  2. Offer a special financial incentive for repeat business. to repeat customers in order to make them feel like they are a value to your business. A rewards program or discount for regular customers can be an excellent way to retain customers.
  3. Keep an email or SMS list. When customers come into your store, find some way to get them to sign up for a mailing list, to keep them aware of special sales, deals, and promotions, on a semi-regular basis. Customers are more likely to return if you give them a specific reason to come back.
    • It's also good to advertise your social networking pages, asking customers to "like" or "friend" your page. This can be a great way of keeping in touch.
  4. Under promise and over-deliver. One of the worst mistakes that a business can make is doing the opposite, and you can do a lot by striving to exceed people's expectations of what's to come. Don't make your product sound like something your customer can't do without if you know it's cheap and unreliable. You'll never retain a customer that way, even if you're friendly and your store is clean.
    • If you know your tamales are better than any tamales in town, you don't have to say "Best tamales in town." Let them speak for themselves. Price them at a reasonable profit margin and sell them regularly for a discount to get the word out. If people know they can get a good deal and good quality, you'll be in business.
  5. Make sure your employees present themselves professionally. It's increasingly common for employees to be at one or the other end of an extreme. In some stores, employees are all aloof, ignoring the customers completely and texting or talking among themselves. In other stores, employees leech onto the customers and refuse to leave them alone. Customers dislike both. Train your employees to be "on" at all times, but also with the ability to be genuine and learn to back off.
    • Employees also need to be well groomed and present themselves in a clean, attractive way while they're at work. Maintain a dress code of some kind at your place of business, appropriate to your product or service.
    • Abercrombie & Fitch recently came under fire for giving preference to thin, white employees.[2] If you want to keep your customers coming back, represent all types of people in your workforce.
  6. Cross-promote your business with complementary businesses. One excellent and underutilized way to retain customers and attract new customers is to hook up with complementary business, or nearby business who offer a different service to a similar customer base, and cross promote.[3]
    • Put up flyers or ads for a vintage clothes store in your laundromat, or sell a local bakery's goods in your coffee shop, in exchange for them selling your coffee at theirs.
  7. Provide free Wi-Fi. While a crowd of people plugged into laptops may not seem like the most attractive customer base, an increase in online freelance work, especially in larger cities, means that a huge segment of the workforce is looking for a place to sit and use Wi-Fi. If you run a restaurant or other place where customers congregate, establishing a policy for Wi-Fi is a great way to bring customers back.
    • One of the problems with Wi-Fi is that sometimes customers will buy one cheap thing and sit there for six hours, taking up a space that you could turn over to new customers. Come up with a timed policy about the Wi-Fi to make it work of you.



Tips

  • Show a genuine interest in your customer and appreciate their business.
  • Create an experience that will make your customers want to return to your business.
  • Anticipate what your customer’s needs are.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2013/08/23/five-tips-for-retaining-customers/
  2. ↑ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2320868/Thin-beautiful-customers-ONLY-How-Abercrombie--Fitch-doesnt-want-larger-people-shopping-stores.html
  3. ↑ http://marketingwizdom.com/strategies/retention-strategies
Retrieved from "https://kipkis.com/index.php?title=Retain_Customers&oldid=361832"