Running a business relies mainly on customer retention, which means ensuring that your customers return to use your products or services time and time again. Customer retention is boosted by customer satisfaction so if you get the customer satisfaction side right then the retention aspect of things will look after itself.
Shutterstock Licensed Photo – By tomertu
Here a few ways you can increase customer satisfaction and therefore increase your customer retention rates.
1. Customer Feedback-
When a customer buys something with you whether that be a service or a product, hand something out to them to encourage customer feedback. This can be highlighted on the receipt or on a separate form to be filled in and handed back. You can also take customer emails when you sell them your product or service which will allow you to send out emails to your customers asking for their thoughts on the service they received. It can even be something simple online that they can go to the via the website to fill in and submit. Customer feedback is great for retention as it allows you to better your company by taking the feedback on board and making changes. It can help to locate problems within the workforce and allow them to be ironed out with things like training days and meetings to make sure the customer service being provided is the best it can be.
2. Offer customer perks –
When a customer shops with you in order to retain their custom, you can set up a rewards system. You can set it up as a reward card or just by taking their email and sending out offers. Things you can look to offer would be faster shipping like something the Walmart free 2-day shipping service, or you can offer free next day delivery. As Well as offering faster shipping you can look to provide discounts with coupons or discount codes that you can send out over promotional periods as a thank you for their custom.
3. Improve ease of use –
Some customers can be deterred from returning if they have had a bad experience navigating a website to purchase the products they were looking for. To try and counter this it is a good idea to make sure that your website is user friendly, meaning they can locate and search for products with ease. Also, if the checkout is long winded, they have to fill it out each time as a returning customer this can cause them not to bother, so giving them the ability to log in and save their details so they don’t have to fill them in each time will help to alleviate this issue. These issues also pass onto a store-based problem to. If your store is cluttered and unorganized then the customer will struggle to find what they are there to look for and if they have a bad checkout experience in store it is likely they will not return.
Running a successful business is largely reliant on customers and if those customers you draw in come back to you time and time again for repeat business. Following these few simple tips can help towards that end goal of customer satisfaction and repeat business.