How to Secure Your Customer

 To improve the loyalty of your customers, there are certain steps that must be taken and these steps I’ll be explaining in this article.

1. Most of my customers are satisfied, why should I worry?

For years, research undertaken by academics and private companies showed that high-quality products and services designed to meet customer needs would create high levels of customer satisfaction, and therefore increase customer loyalty.

An example of a company that studies the way customers react to satisfaction of goods and services is

Xerox Corporation. In-depth satisfaction studied by Xerox Corporation of its office product customers shattered this conventional wisdom. The firm’s totally satisfied customers were six times more likely to purchase Xerox products in the 18 months following the study than where its satisfied customers who had the freedom to make choices was not enough to keep them loyal. Xerox found that the only truly loyal customer is totally satisfied customer.

So, you should be concerned rather than heartened if the majority of your customers fall into the satisfied category.

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Merely satisfied customers are ripe targets for competitors because they are easy converts. Some might ask, “Why did these customers say they were satisfied in the first place?” The answer is that, “Regardless of how they feel, customers of companies with reasonable good product or service quality tend to find it difficult to respond negatively to customer satisfaction surveys.”

In markets with intense competition, there is a tremendous difference between the loyalty of satisfied and completely satisfied customers.

2. How can I increase customer loyalty?

Follow below steps to approach increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty. These steps can be applied to any kind of business you may be running.

• From dissatisfied to satisfied customer: Deliver at competitive prices , basic products or services as expected by any one in the industry. 

• From satisfied to totally satisfied customer: Examine your product and service from the customer’s perspective to pinpoint and eliminate irritants (making it very easy to do business with you).

Constantly improve product or service delivery to meet (and even exceed ) customers expectation (providing more than yesterday and less than tomorrow).

Develop proactive service recovery (feedback) to make amendments when something goes wrong or right.

• To make maintain total customer satisfaction (highly loyal): Repeat actions from step 2. Be consistent and very dependable.

Example:

In the last decade a large number of car dealerships have expanded their services to include overnight and express drop-off, loaner vehicles and free washing and waxing. Some also have instituted the practice of checking back with customers within 24 hours to make sure the problem was fixed properly. If there is still a problem, fixing it becomes a top priority.