Customer Service
Ask SCORE                                                                        Word Count 401

Make Customers Loyal to Your Business

When customers can easily comparison shop online with a few mouse clicks, the
notion of loyalty seems almost old fashioned. Your best customers are someone
else’s most sought-after prospects.

Big companies have adopted a fancy term for addressing the problem, called
“customer retention management” or CRM. Massive amounts of time and energy
are devoted to it, including countless Web sites, conferences, software products,
online applications, magazines and books.

The core of the issue, however, comes down to something small business owners
have been good at for centuries: building customer loyalty. A loyal customer is
doing business with you, not your competition.

Small businesses that concentrate on keeping customers are more successful in
the long run.  It only stands to reason. Selling to folks you already know and
understand is more efficient, more predictable and more profitable.  A loyal
customer base gives you an edge.

But building loyalty is not a marketing matter, so don’t look there for help. Spend all
you want to attract new cadres of customers, but if they don’t stick around your
days could be numbered.

When a customer leaves, you should consider it unacceptable. Find out why it
happened and then work to prevent it from happening again.  

To foster customer loyalty, a small business needs a strategy that keeps patrons
coming back. It starts with basics that are sometimes overlooked. Thanking
customers for their business, for example, goes a long way. But try going beyond a
few spoken words. Write some thank you notes and letters. Make them personal
and sincere. Just let them know you appreciate their business.

Creating value will help boost loyalty. Ask customers if there is anything else you
could be doing for them. Then, after they tell you, do it.

Customers are more likely to be loyal if you make it easy for them. Review each
customer  “touch point” — your phones, your Web site, your store — for ease of
use. Offer incentives. You can’t buy loyalty, but you can make it easier to happen.
Special perks, discounts or freebies for loyalty work wonders.

To learn more about generating customer loyalty for your small business, contact
SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business." SCORE is a nonprofit
organization of more than 10,500 volunteer business counselors who provide free,
confidential business counseling and training workshops to small business
owners. Go to www.scoredm.org on the web or call (515) 284-4760 between the
hours of 10:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. Monday through Friday.