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A happy customer is a returning customer. Brand loyalty is when your users have the opportunity and good reason to choose another brand, and yet they choose to stick with you. Maybe it’s how your brand looks. Maybe it’s how it sounds, tastes, or feels. Whatever it is, something clicked with them and they clicked with you.

If your product sells today, that’s no guarantee it will sell tomorrow, or a year from now. Unless you’re giving away free cash bundles, holding on to a user base is no walk in the park. Some companies use surveys to see how consumers view their brand and how they stack against their competitors, and they adjust their practices based on the feedback. Others prefer to pour all their resources into building trust, quality and value, without asking too much around. But most don’t bother to do any of these things. And that’s no way to obtain loyalty.

Cust serv love tips

Master what you do – Be a good adviser and master all aspects of your product so that you can provide prompt help, whenever needed. Remember, for the customer you’re the product’s closest relative 🙂 If the customer cannot count on you for help, who else is he/she going to turn to? It’s also important to jump in even before things unfold, if you feel the situation calls for it. Like giving a heads up about an outage beforehand. This builds trust.

Deliver – It’s important to keep your promises when it comes to the quality of your service. Statistically, 68% of customers leave because they are unhappy with the service they receive. Consumers also tend to remember negative experiences more than they do good ones. It might take as little as one bad episode for them to consider enlisting the services of your competitors. However, it’s impossible to offer a flawless experience for everyone 100% of the time.

Polish up – Pay careful attention at the aspects your clients condemn the most. Maybe it’s a bug in the software. Maybe it’s something UX-related. Maybe it’s a missing feature. Listening to these demands and acting on them builds value into your product. Every such decision should be made considering the bigger picture, which Product Management has access to. Just let the client know why some requests can be implemented, while others not.

Build a community – Deepen your customer connection with a forum, or just plain social media. Nowadays it’s a must to be available online for existing users to follow your progress and new users to discover you. Having an online presence keeps your clients in the loop with new product releases, updates, tips and tricks etc. Consumers today expect to be pampered with options. Speaking of tips and tricks…

Offer educational materials – If you sell a service, be sure you don’t force your customers to pick up the phone and call support for everything. Make their life easy with a database that’s easy to browse, including KB articles, how-to guides with detailed graphics, and anything that might be helpful to them 😉 When you’re on the phone with them, keep these documents handy so you can go through them together, step by step.

Emotional brand bond

To deliver service, you must first have a user base. To create a user base, you need to stand out from your competitors. If consumers are emotionally attached to a product (in addition to having their needs fulfilled by that product), they will stick with it. If you care about the product and put emotion in your campaigns, you have it made. Here are some numbers to go with that.

Caring means delivering first and asking later. Add a dash of feeling to your brand and they won’t look elsewhere for their fix. Customers don’t pick a product solely based on price. Otherwise, the 1st generation iPhone would have also been the last 😉