10 Tips for Building Customer Loyalty

Written by KOVA Corp

Everybody knows that it costs much less to keep a customer than to attract a new one. And every interaction your contact center has with a customer is an opportunity to build on that person’s sense of loyalty to your company. By implementing the following ten tips, you can help your contact center excel at satisfying those valuable existing customers.   

1. See things from your customer’s point of view. Act like a mystery shopper – approach your contact center like a customer does. Call your call center, send an email inquiry, try the live chat. Go through each social media option your organization uses. Make sure you’re fully aware of what your customers are experiencing at each touch point you offer.

2. Eat, breathe, and sleep customer service. Every single contact center agent is a representative of your business. Whatever they say - or type – is what the customer will see as your company’s official statement on the matter. You need to ensure that, in every communication, customers are impressed by the level of customer service they receive.

3. Really help customers. A contact center’s job is to help customers. Each agent needs to be willing to own the customer problems they are dealing with, not just pass calls off and forget about them. Train them to stay involved until the issue is resolved, and even to follow up with the customer afterwards to make sure everything worked out to his or her satisfaction. This will do wonders for customer loyalty.  

4. Look at complaints as opportunities, not interruptions. While listening to complaints is never fun, it is a great way to gather feedback and problem solve your policies and procedures. If agents approach complaints with this mindset, they’ll be less inclined to think of them as nuisances – they’ll be fact-finding missions, instead! And that attitude will come through in the way they handle the call.

5. Acknowledge your staff. The more your employees feel like valued members of a team, the more engaged they’ll be in their jobs. They need to understand how what they do contributes to the company’s bottom line – so they can see just how important they are. Increased engagement leads to increased performance.

6. Act quickly when there is a problem. Customers hate nothing more than being transferred multiple times in order to get a problem taken care of. Empower your agents to handle calls themselves, if possible, and if a transfer is absolutely necessary, keep it to one.

7. Sometimes it is the technology’s fault, not the customer’s. If you receive complaints about the difficulty of using your company’s website, don’t blame the customer. Technology should be there to guide consumers, not to frustrate them more. Acknowledge to the customer that it can be tricky to work with, instead of acting as if they’re ignorant.

8. Provide ongoing employee training. Teaching employees to be customer-focused is not a one-and-done deal. It needs to be constantly reinforced. Customer service is a lot more complicated than just “being nice.” Proper training requires in-depth work.

9. Be enthusiastic! You set the tone for your contact center. If you are positive and inspiring, your employees will follow right along with you. And happy, enthusiastic agents make for more satisfied customers.

10. Have fun! Though it may seem counter-intuitive, have fun with your customers! It builds a relationship, which in turn builds customer loyalty.

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