Quantity or Loyalty: What Should Business Owners Look For?

To any commercial activity, customers are invaluable. This is the very nature of it and this is how it works. The entire business model is established around these universal aspects when running a trade – creating customers, keeping customers and then creating more of them. Having a good product (goods or services) is essential, but putting an effective marketing process in place is equally important in order to reach out to the target audience. This, in turn, paves the way to future customers.

One of the most successful companies in the world, Apple, is a great example of this.

Any business grows with its consumers. The quantity of people buying your services is a solid indication of how the business is doing at a particular point in time. Of course, the higher the number of people investing in your products, the better it is.

What Does it Mean for the Future of a Business though?

The amount of customers you have is only a part of the bigger picture. It is not a true indication of the future prospects of any business. The reason could be you may have many one-time customers and the sales, while reflecting healthy numbers at a given point of time, do not guarantee similar performance for the times ahead. Unless the previous customers come back. This is when loyalty starts to build.

Question is, what is customer loyalty?
Customer loyalty occurs if consumers decide to use a particular shop or buy one particular product over the other. What’s more, loyalty towards a brand seems evident when customers consistently purchase a certain product over an extended period of time.

Realizing the Importance of Customer Loyalty

The importance of loyalty in customers must neither be underestimated nor overlooked. It is imperative to realize that loyal customers have the ability to create new customers which can only be a good thing for any business. For this reason alone, having such customers can be of greater importance than simply having more number of customers (which could mean anything).

But Who is a Loyal Customer and How Important Is It to Have One?

• A loyal customer can be described as someone who is a regular customer to a particular business even when there might be other similar businesses (competition) in existence
• True loyalty is out of a customer’s own choice and not because a business is the only one of its kind out there in the market
• Loyal customers are sure to recommend your business to other people, usually by way of word-of-mouth publicity, thereby increasing your chances to have new customers
• New customers create new chances to have more loyal customers in future
• Having loyal customers help in establishing company goodwill
• It is almost a certainty that loyal customers not only believe in your product, but also in your business ethics
• Companies with loyal customer base are inevitably looked at as dependable

The world is full of such examples. Be it a publication, an online portal, a YouTube channel or even a TV show, anything that has been running successfully for a number of years can’t do it on funding alone, especially when it comes to achieving positive popularity and a strong fan base. For example, a TV show like Top Gear has enjoyed years of unparalleled viewership purely because of the viewers watching the show dedicatedly for years.

Another example which can be considered from a present-day trend is looking at a number of successful YouTube channels. One of the most popular technology channels, MKBHD, has one of the largest followings in the online space today because people believe in the content and the way it is presented. Having a follower on a platform like YouTube is ideally a sign of loyalty.

Clearly, it is essential to have customers who are devoted to your brand irrespective of how many customers you may have otherwise. Other than having a worthy product and good overall business ethics, there are other important ways like having an effective customer service, as well as marketing or customer engagement strategies in place that help in creating customer loyalty.

Ways to Create Loyalty in Customers

People expect prompt service at all levels of their interaction with your business, right from the moment they start looking for the product on your website or in your offline store. This can be a challenge for businesses operating completely on the web space because you are not dealing with people face to face. In that situation, one of the priorities should be to create an environment, or the interface, which is:

User-friendly
Responsive to customer queries
Useful at keeping customers engaged with a brand
Helpful for customers to complete a sale

Whether or not a visitor is new to your website, having a user-friendly interface is one of the good business practices because a website that is easy to explore can retain a visitor long enough with the potential to create a prospective buyer. That is always a good start.

To build on that, it is vital to have a good customer support system in place which can be achieved, to a great extent, by incorporating a live chat feature across the website.

With a live chat tool, you can provide instant help, it can also allow visitors to have personalized assistance to, for example, finalize a product out of a number of choices. This can emulate an experience of being inside a real shop interacting face to face with a sales executive.

Furthermore, customers can use this feature to remind or request updates on their existing queries. Quick and positive response through enterprise chat software such as this builds confidence in people and also makes them feel important. All this is paramount in creating a sense of belonging which in turn starts to establish loyalty. Additionally, the aforementioned live chat Software helps to create and send canned responses (automated responses) for a number of situations that are usual in nature. This further increases the promptness in the overall response time.

Today, when virtually every business has a presence on the internet, it has become easier to reach out to people, to market and promote and simultaneously, it has given rise to competition as well. While product quality remains unquestionably paramount, effective customer support software, especially in the form of live chat, is increasingly finding its way into many online businesses.

People, business owners and customers alike, are recognizing the importance of adding the element of human interaction to their websites. Generating variety in creating a better customer experience can make websites, that do not offer such services, appear monotonous. Having a customer-centric approach can make for an enjoyable experience for a normal website visitor or a customer. In either case, it is likely to create good business prospects.

Boosting Customer Loyalty with Customer Support Software – a Holy Grail for a Flourishing Business

People love to share and pass on their experiences, good or bad, with others. Positive experiences especially from reliable sources like friends and family bring more people to a business and often guarantee instant sales in case the visitor actually wants to acquire a product. And unless something particularly goes wrong with the experience, it is possible that the regularity of a new customer, who has come by recommendation, is a given.

It is like building a relationship on trust and loyalty. Think of it this way, a large number of customers buying your product can lead to impressive sales figures at a given period of time, but the ones who are loyal hold the power to ensure a bright future for any business.