New clients are revitalizing your business, but loyal customers make the company stable and profitable from a long-term perspective.
Many studies prove the power of customer loyalty, but we will point out two facts:
- Increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by up to 95%.
- Attracting new customers costs five times more than retaining existing ones.
It pays off to treat your clients as partners and build stronger relationships with recurring buyers, but how do you achieve this feat? How can you make a customer feel like being your friend?
Keep reading as we are about to give you eight highly practical tips!
1. Listen to Your Clients
A solid relationship is based on trust and understanding. You have to listen to your clients to make things work between you. After all, how can you show respect if you don’t care for a customer’s opinion?
Your job is to start paying attention to your clients, hear their problems, and follow their comments across all communication channels. That includes your website, social media accounts, emails, phone calls, and every other communication platform you might be using to interact with consumers.
2. Build a Standout Customer Service
The majority of customer interactions begin with customer service representatives, so you ought to build a team of reliable, polite, and knowledgeable agents. They should know everything about your regular clients and personalize communication as much as possible.
Returning visitors should have a clear priority over new customers because it confirms that your organization respects loyalty.
Of course, it is essential to reply to users’ inquiries quickly and solve any brand-related issues they might be dealing with.
3. Keep Your Promises
Let’s say you run an essay paper agency and promise one of the clients to complete the work within 24 hours. Your customer is counting on you, which means it would be a terrible mistake not to deliver the work as promised.
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This tip goes without saying, but we’ve seen way too many companies that tend to overpromise and under-deliver. It would be best if you did the opposite, and your customers will realize your reliability.
4. Exploit Word of Mouth Marketing
Do you know that almost 75% of consumers identify word of mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions? It’s a critical marketing weapon in your marketing arsenal, so you better make sure to use it in a variety of formats. Here are our favorites:
- Customer testimonials on your website immediately welcome users with a message of trust and professional authority.
- It is always a good idea to create video case studies where one of your clients gives your company an in-depth review.
- Influencers can add value to your word of mouth strategy, but make sure to pick a person who matches your branding guidelines.
5. Be Honest
Good friends are honest and ready to speak openly. You should embrace the same mindset and keep the customer informed about possible issues or delays. Don’t lie and don’t hide important information – it will only make your client angry and suspicious, so you’ll end up ruining a solid relationship. Be honest and transparent – loyal customers will appreciate it.
6. Prove Personal Accountability
Another thing you can do to make a customer feel like your friend is to prove personal accountability. It doesn’t take too much effort, but it can do miracles for customer relationships. How can you do it?
For instance, you can tell a client to consult with colleagues from another department and add something like this: “Call me if you don’t get the answer quickly.” It’s a clear sign that you are ready to help the client, even though it’s not your area of work.
7. Create a Comprehensive FAQ Page
An all-encompassing FAQ page won’t help you build excellent relationships with consumers, but the result will be a side effect. A typical customer will have lots of questions about your business, products, services, and delivery. So you’ll save everyone’s time simply by providing these answers on a comprehensive FAQ page. Your clients will be happy to find so many answers in one place, and the only thing left for you will be to answer more complex questions and inquiries.
8. Apologize If Needed
A true friend will always apologize for doing something wrong, which is exactly what you should do after making a mistake.
Customers understand that everybody makes mistakes, but they expect you to say you’re sorry and explain how to solve the issue.
The Bottom Line
Customer retention is the ultimate business objective, but it takes a lot of hard work and strategic planning to make a broad base of loyal clients. In this post, we analyzed eight tricks to make a customer feel like being your friend.
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