How to reach the customer’s heart and build customer loyalty

Whoever has a loyal customer has a treasure. Acquiring new customers can be up to five times more expensive than keeping them, so the star goal of brands is to establish stable relationships with consumers.

But before you marry someone, you need to make them fall in love with you. How can you reach the customer’s heart and build loyalty? Follow these tips to create an unforgettable romance.

How can you reach the customer’s heart and build loyalty?

1) Make the shopping experience extraordinary

Really good shopping experiences stay in our memory for a long time and affect our perception of the brand and products.

To achieve a memorable shopping experience, there are many factors that come into play. Here are just a few examples:

• Customer service. If a user needs help, they should find a quick and kind answer.
• The design of the e-commerce or the physical store. If you think about brands like Ikea or Amazon, you can see how paying attention to this aspect facilitates seamless and unique shopping experiences.
• The ease with which the user can find what they are looking for. Clutter leads to frustration, frustration leads to abandonment, and abandonment leads to the dark side…
• The packaging. Beauty is on the inside, but useful packaging with an attractive design scores many points.

2) Customer service should shine, and not by its absence

For a customer to feel well cared for, the ideal would be to give an answer immediately or in less than two hours. If this is not possible, 24 hours may be a reasonable timeframe, although it always depends on the type of product and the customer’s expectations.

3) Humanize your chatbots

Chatbots are one of the latest trends in customer service, and thanks to artificial intelligence, there are more and more requests to which they can respond. Therefore, given the impossibility of having a natural person 24 hours a day, many brands resort to this type of solution. Of course, if you want users to feel well cared for, you will have to take care of their dialogues to make them (almost) human.

4) Get involved

The customer perceives the involvement of a brand in their experience through many small details: courtesy, genuine interest in their needs, willingness to help… In a word, listen to him.

5) Be excellent

Excellence in care makes a difference. It is about offering a good service and seeking customer happiness above all else.

To provide excellent service, you will need to have employees who are satisfied with their conditions, motivated, and happy. They are the ones who will be in charge of making suggestions to the customer, looking for their well-being and not the benefit of the brand. To gain their trust, sincerity is a must. And it is that no relationship benefits from a lack of honesty…

6) Be agile

Do you have a physical store? Move the checkout queue, packing queue, or ask for attention as fast as possible. You want to win over your customers, and nothing pushes them away more than making them feel like they’re wasting their time.

The same principle can be applied to any e-commerce: it simplifies the process. The fewer steps users have to take to complete a purchase, the more they will convert and the better served they will feel.

7) Fix the problems

If you don’t want your customer to leave you and go with another brand, never leave them stranded with their problems! The goal of any brand is to help and make it easier for customers to be happy, so offer them quick and easy solutions instead of putting obstacles in the way.

Remember that nowadays buzz marketing or word-of-mouth marketing is of key importance to get and retain customers, and no rumor spreads faster than “this company treated me badly, run away!”.

8) Tell stories

No one likes people who only talk about themselves, and brands are no exception. Today’s customers, like millennials, don’t care too much about the wonders of your product. What they want is to hear stories that hook them, that touch their hearts, that make them laugh, cry, and vibrate. This is how they will start to fall in love with your brand. And to get them across, social networks are your most powerful weapons.