16 Small Business Customer Loyalty Tips

"When the customer comes first, the customer will last" ~ Robert Half

A good set of loyal customers is invaluable for a successful business venture. Whether you own a dyes and chemicals retail business or deal in home safety devices, the following tips will help you build and keep a steady customer base.

1. Reward customer loyalty – Introduce free gifts, promotional items, discounts, complementary services, etc for your regular and long time customers. This will also motivate newly acquired customers towards loyalty. And as the word about loyalty benefit spreads, it might lead to some free business advertising too.

2. Keep your promises – Let your customers know that they're dealing with someone trustworthy. Make timely delivery for their purchases, ensure timely resolution to customer complaints, be honest while making commitments to them, keep your word when you offer assurances. However, when mistakes do occur, make sure you do enough to make up for customer inconvenience.

3. Don't let automated attendants make you lose customers – Most routine customer queries can be adequately resolved using automated technology. However, your automated attendants and interactive voice response systems shouldn't make it exceedingly hard for customers to talk to a live person. Sometimes urgent issues require quick contact with a human rep, and if your customers are consistently disappointed with your system, you may never hear from them again.

4. Add a personal touch to your service – Try to remember the names of your regular customers, or at least their faces. You'll establish a better rapport with them if you seem to know each one of them personally.

5. Deliver exceptional customer service - Having a good customer service function is essential to improving the level of customer satisfaction by a good measure. Go that extra mile while resolving customer queries and make customers feel important.

6. Train your employees for better customer service - Continuous training will arm your employees with more, newer and better skills, and improving the overall quality of customer service as a result.

7. Ensure that your staff has good knowledge of your products – Superior product knowledge will enable your staff to advise your clients better, and up-sell complementary products, upgrades, or other add-ons to better meet customer needs.

8. Treat new customers with the same respect as the older ones – Remember that your loyal customers were once new to your business, and only after proving their loyalty have they earned a special place for your business. But you needn't wait for new customers to prove themselves before they earn your respect and appreciation. Instead, you can take the lead, and show them the respect and courtesy that you extend to older customers, so that the new ones are compelled to become loyal to your business. At the same time, you need to watch out for those few customers, who won't bat an eyelid no matter what you do. And then it's better to focus your resources elsewhere than on them.

9. Don't just meet, but try to exceed customer expectations – Consistently delivering more than what you promise your customers and what they expect will simply delight them. For instance, you may not be stocking products that a customer wants, however, you can still offer to procure it for the customer, or at least guide the customer to the right sources, rather than greeting the customer with the message "We can't help you."

10. Focus on serving customers than just on making money – While making a profit is at the core of running a business, you needn't let that supersede the objective of serving customers. Make sincere efforts to understand what your customers want, carefully listen to their suggestions, ideas, complaints, etc, don't be pushy while trying to make a sale, etc.

11. Focus on employee motivation – Remember, it's your staff that renders customer service, and sells your products and services, is responsible for the smooth functioning and improvements to your business operations. All of which will help you deliver better services and encourage customers to keep coming back to you. See 10 Small Business Employee Motivation Tips for more information.

12. Ask your customers for feedback – Customers expectations will change overtime, and you'll need to modify your offerings accordingly in order to have them coming back to you. Learning of your prospects needs in advance, and bringing out products and services that better meet these will also provide you an edge over competition. Reach out to your customers with feedback forms and surveys to learn about the weaknesses of your service, their unresolved complaints, suggestions, ideas, and more. Act on the the analysis to encourage loyalty, towards improving your products and services. Don't forget to thank customers for their feedback!

13. Keep in touch – Don't forget your customers once they've purchased from you. Stay connected with your regular clients by sending season's greetings, birthday wishes, newsletters, thank you cards, special offers, feedback forms, etc.

14. If possible, use software to track customer loyalty – Buying these software programs will often help you systematically maintain customer information, record sales and communication data, implement satisfaction feedback systems. And will enable tracking the progress of loyalty schemes that you roll out viz. discounts, extended warranties, free offers, coupons, rebates, etc. Use of software by itself won't increase loyalty, but it can help enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer loyalty efforts.

15. Be proactive in retaining customers – Be alert in understanding the the tell-tale signs of a customer planning to switch over to another business viz. progressively decreasing orders. Talk to these customers to find out if they're having problems with your services, and act in a timely manner to resolve their complaints and to retain them.

16. Try to bring back lost customers – Don't assume that lost customers are lost forever. Instead try to understand what led them to it, and do your best to resolve their concerns to bring them back. This it worth the effort because at times it's still cheaper to win back clients, than win new customers. And that it might also reveal a serious weakness in your system that you may have been ignoring, or that hasn't been adequately addressed.