According to industry experts, there are at least four different strategies you can use to keep customers depending on your customer base and your company's capabilities.
Recognize Your Customers
Recognize MVCs (Most Valuable Customers) with special treatment. Find a way to identify them to your employees each time they do business with you. An example would be flagging a repeat customer's account, and making sure they always get a 5% discount.
Personal Edge. Any correspondence or communication you have with your customer should be personalized when possible. There should be some level of human contact, or at least a customized mailing. For example, starting a form letter that goes with a bill "Dear Jane, Thank you for your business...".
Loyalty Purchasing
Buying customer loyalty is the first instinct for most businesses when they are taking a significant loss in their customer base. But as a tactic it has a limited return. It is easily matched by your competitors, and seems to customers like just another marketing promotion. It is really not much different than price slashing to attract new customers.
Product Quality
Quality is vital! Customers won't return for a bad product, so make your product at least as good as what your competition has to offer. However, customer satisfaction all by itself is usually not enough to keep them coming back. There's got to be more.
Many businesses measure their CSI (customer satisfaction index) with customer surveys. These companies believe that the only kind of customer satisfaction that really counts is the "top box" (the highest possible rating).
Customization
As mentioned in our article Customizing a Commodity - Johnsons Makes It Personal, the most effective strategy for keeping customers is to customize your service to each customer's needs. This means allowing the customer to tell you their preferred service techniques, then providing your service or product accordingly. This is the nature of a "Learning Relationship" with a customer, one that gets smarter and smarter with every interaction.
The best way to keep your customers committed to you, is to use their feedback to tailor your products and services. If you can convince a customer to teach you how to cater to his or her tastes, then you can keep that customer loyal. The more time and energy the customer expends doing this, the harder it will be for them to get the same level of service from your competitor.
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