How to Retain Customers for Life

By Valentine Okolo

Customers will continue to patronize you as long as they continue to have good experiences over and over again. Over the years I have come to realize that building customer loyalty is focused on 3 cardinal points. They are: Product Quality, Service Excellence and Customer Feedback.

1.       Ensure Product Quality Always: Without quality products, it is impossible to retain customers for life. It’s that simple. Customers care about their own satisfaction than they do about the success or failure of the company. To be continually relevant to the customer, you must be innovative and unique.  The least you can do is to ensure you don’t fall below quality standards.

2.       Ensure Service Excellence Always: To ensure service excellence always, you must understand and display a high sense of emotional intelligence always. Emotional intelligence is the ability to learn or understand the feelings of others. When translated to service delivery, emotional intelligence becomes the ability to learn or understand the feelings of your customers. To do this effectively, it becomes imperative that everyone in the organization learns to display a good degree of empathy in discharging service to the customer. Customers are emotionally attached to companies that show them that they care about how they feel and not just about their money. Companies’ that display a high sense of emotional intelligence in service delivery ultimately get rewarded with repeated patronage. In achieving service excellence everyone in the organization must learn to: deliver service promptly and timely, learn to be polite, display high level of empathy, be knowledgeable about company products and services, be conversational and friendly, avoid Offensive Acts that Depict nonchalance, learn the act of managing angry customers and Show professionalism in all situations. A more detailed article on service excellence can be found here: http://valentineokolo.blogspot.com/2014/10/how-to-develop-emotional-intelligence.html

3.       Obtain Feedback: Feedback allows you to determine: whether your clients are totally satisfied with the product or service you’ve rendered ,what your clients may expect as product or service modifications, additional products or services that are required that you may not have been originally aware of and your customer service ratings.

 Article written by Valentine Okolo