The Rising Need for Customer Loyalty in a Digital World as told by Bundle CX Lead, Omoyemi Otitoju
In a fast-growing digitally led world, building loyalty in customers isn’t merely about your product — there are a lot of cool brands out there. According to Global Entrepreneurship Management, there are about 305 million startups are created annually. Statista reports that 7.1% of these startups are FinTechs.
Because the world is now a global village, the competition is not only restricted to a region, it is now anyone who offers the same services or products as you. The question on everyone’s mind is how do you make your customer stay loyal to your brand.
Customer Loyalty is a by-product of how satisfied any customer is with a product or service, Zendesk says that 52% of customers report going out of their way to buy from brands they’re loyal to. This is driven by a combination of customer experience and also the product. Every decision made in every department is driven towards improving the overall experience for customers which in turn, generates loyalty and trust in the brand.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is everything about a business that affects how a customer feels about your brand. It relates to any way that a person interacts with a brand during the cause of their customer journey. This definition strikes the difference between CX and customer service. Customer service is just one aspect of the overall customer experience.
Delving deeper into the customer service aspect of driving customer loyalty, I will be discussing ways in which you can use this tool to foster loyalty.
4 Best Practices to Build Customer Loyalty
1. Understand customers’ needs
Sharing the wrong or unhelpful resources can annoy customers and make them lose interest faster than you think. For any member of a Customer Experience team, knowledge is power. Understanding the product and how it relates to customer needs enables you to assist them effectively.
Understanding is not only tied to resolving the problem, it is also being able to gauge the emotions of your customer and giving the appropriate response to diffuse the situation. Being able to display empathy and understanding for the customer’s issue helps them trust in your ability to resolve it.
Using more personalized words like “I am sorry” instead of “apologies”, makes a difference when dealing with a customer.
2. Help at every point
Put in place a solid infrastructure that works naturally for the users by ensuring the availability of easy-to-understand FAQs and instructional guides to nudge customers when they miss their way helps the customer’s experience be easy and seamless.
This can easily be done by knowing the pain points of your products and also studying recurring cases that your customer experience team deals with to create these FAQs,
For example in Bundle, we have FAQs not only on our support channel but also on the app, this helps our users find answers to their questions without reaching the CX team.
3. Prompt response
Nothing works better to impress a customer and build brand loyalty than a prompt response. One of the best ways for a business to ensure good service delivery is to improve the average First Response Time as well as the average Resolution Time for user complaints.
4. Collect Feedback
Ensure customer feedback is not only collected but carefully analyzed, taken seriously, and acted upon. This lets users know that you are listening to their specific concerns and they can trust your brand to continue to satisfy their needs as they grow.
This feedback should also be shared team-wide, to ensure that every decision taken as regards the brand is led by a customer-centric process.
It is important to remember, that for customer experience to be effective, it not only rests on customer support, it is a design that has to be implemented across every team in a brand.
