Customer loyalty is priceless. If you retain customers, they’ll spend far more than the price of their initial purchase over a lifetime. Plus, current customers are more likely to make major purchases or upsells. But the only way to cultivate this prized group is to form meaningful connections which increase customer engagement and loyalty.
Always keep the customer experience in mind. Try to understand how your brand’s actions and communications make a customer feel. After all, brand loyalty starts as a feeling; a spark of goodwill toward a company. And if you cultivate that feeling of goodwill through positive interactions, then you can boost engagement and loyalty for all your customers.
Tips for Increasing Customer Engagement and Loyalty
After a customer purchases your product or service, begin nurturing a fruitful customer relationship by helping the customer learn to fully adopt your product. New customers need to see the value of your product as soon as possible, and teaching them everything they need to know about using it is the first step. It’s the best way to deliver on sales promises and meet high customer expectations.
Once a customer begins to see the value of your product, they should have a positive impression of your brand. Next, your task is to reinforce those satisfied feelings and deepen the customer relationship. Here are some useful tips for improving customer engagement and loyalty:
#1: Offer Responsive Customer Service
Nothing makes an impression like good, old-fashioned customer service. To start, make it easy for customers to engage with your customer success team. Keep relevant contact information in an easy-to-find location and make sure your team is available and responsive.
If a customer contacts you online, they expect a quick turnaround. Make it your goal to reply to all inquiries within four hours or less. Follow-up with pending correspondences in a timely manner as well. If an unhappy customer opens an escalation ticket, make sure you have fully serviced the complaint and offered a resolution within 30 days.
Finally, use active listening skills. Record customer feedback and make sure management reviews it, as feedback provides invaluable data that can help you identify bottlenecks along the customer journey. Then, act upon that feedback. Customers will learn that you really care about their opinions and concerns.
#2:Enable Proactive Communications
Customers love hearing about upcoming new features and products as it gives them something exciting to look forward to. Whenever you have a new release or product update coming up, let customers know about it early. It does more than just build anticipation for your release. Proactive communications are part of the customer lifecycle, and they help to deepen customer loyalty.
People respond well when they can look forward to a new release or product update ahead of time. The goal is to not only let customers know what’s coming up but to give your business time to proactively anticipate customers’ future needs. And by anticipating what kinds of assistance customers are going to need, you can offer more personalized service.
Informing customers of any news or information early on is at the heart of proactive communication. For example, if your development teams are working on new features, customers will be interested in knowing how the work is going. They’ll want to know if your team is meeting deadlines and if your release is going according to plan, and they will appreciate frequent status updates. Let them know about any delays that may push back a delivery date so you can avoid disappointing customers or breaking promises.
Methods of practicing proactive communication includes sending out multi-channel communications, opt-in notifications, or by holding monthly reporting calls. It shows your company cares about customers, provides transparency, and wants to build trust. And this is a great way to deepen the customer relationship.
#3: Help Customers Build a Community
Your company has worked hard to create a quality brand and product or service. But do you have a following of customers who enjoy using and discussing your products as a group? Customers don’t want to feel like they are the only ones experiencing a brand or engaging in the customer journey. They want to feel like they are part of something greater—a community—and that other people share the same experience with them.
That’s why you should nurture and facilitate community building between your customers, wherever they like to congregate. You can encourage them to participate in community forums, on social platforms or even by holding in-person meet-ups. This kind of community is good for customers and great for your business.
Customer communities enhance the customer experience. They give members a place to share ideas and learn new ones. Together, customers collaborate on solving problems, create theories, and inspire each other. These communities may use your product to develop their own innovations or bring their own personal meaning to your brand’s identity—which adds priceless, authentic value.
Once a community develops around your brand, pay attention! By focusing on the customer experience as it occurs within the customer community, you have a powerful means of deepening customer loyalty. And by listening to the insights that these communities generate you engage in social listening, which is a feedback loop between you and your community that can increase the value of your brand.
Improve Customer Engagement and Loyalty with the Right Software
When you have a large number of customers or product lines, it can be hard to give people the individualized attention they need. One way to make this job easier is to use a customer success platform.
Customer success platforms offer visibility of every customer’s account and history. They can assess customer behavior to create health scores—ratings that indicate which customers are satisfied and which ones could use more support. Better yet, customer success platforms make it easy to take action in response to customer health scores, enabling you to nurture unhappy customers or offer upsells to healthy accounts. Improving customer engagement and loyalty is a detailed, ongoing process, so make sure your organization is using the right tools to be successful.
Loyal customers bring in stable revenue and can spread positive word-of-mouth advertising. As such, it’s critical that you understand how your customers feel about your brand and grow goodwill through meaningful engagements.
Totango offers the functionality you need to deepen customer relationships, track the customer journey, take advantage of upsell or cross-sell opportunities, and prevent churn. Request a demo or explore Spark to start inspiring greater customer loyalty today.
