Why Reducing Customer Effort is Important to Build Customer Loyalty

Posted by Taniya arya

There is no doubt that building customer loyalty multiplies your revenue streams and reduces the customer churn. Loyal customers are more likely to return back and the cost of selling to them is low. The best part is, they will frequently refer your business to others, which in turn, gives you a high return on the time, money and energy you invest in delivering amazing customer service.

According to Gartner, “65% of a company’s business comes from pre-existing customers, and it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than maintaining strong relationship with an existing one.”

For any business, having repeat customers is a very crucial aspect to achieve sustainability in this highly dynamic world. Hence, converting customers into loyal ones should be the top most priority. Many sales and marketing evangelists turn to gimmicks to build a loyal customer base. How effective such promotions are would vary, since banking upon the gimmicks could be a success or failure for your business.

So, in what ways a business should approach in gaining customer loyalty?

Customer Satisfaction does not Automatically Imply Loyalty:

In their book named ‘The Effortless Experience’, Nick Toman and Rick Delisi of CEB explores the new ways in managing customer loyalty. Their researches unveiled some trends that challenge existing rules and conventional intelligence. In this study, a key finding unleashes that customer satisfaction does not automatically drive customer loyalty. Customers whose expectations were surpassed and customers whose expectations were simply met are at the same level who are willing to do the repeat business. So, it seems that there is a hype behind always going beyond the customer expectations. Although, it is a good approach to delight your customers, but you should balance out the effort. Trying to exceed the customer expectations seems to deliver diminishing results.

Reducing Customer Effort is Vital:

If the idea to delight customers by exceeding their expectations doesn’t necessarily secure customer loyalty, then what other thing make it happen? Paying full attention to what makes customers disloyal is the key to drive loyalty. From the various studies, it has found that customers don’t mind to switch brand if they are required to put some extra effort with the product or service or connecting with the appropriate representative to resolve certain queries. This indicates that focusing on resolving customer issues with minimal effort from the customer end is the secret to building loyal customer base.

Decrease Potential Causes of Issues:

It is true that added effort causes disloyalty. Therefore, it is essential for businesses to focus on preventing any difficulty at the first place. This can be achieved by providing exceptional customer experience that eradicates the potential issues. Online businesses should focus on providing an efficient UX that reduces the likelihood that users will commit a mistake.

Improve Customer Engagement:

As customers are using various channels to communicate, businesses should be prepared to interact with customers at multiple fronts. Providing customer care helpline number is not just enough to communicate with the internet-oriented audience. Today, an increasing number of users prefer other channels like email, social media, and live chat to connect with the business. One way to overcome this is to provide self-service option for the customers. To incorporate a self-service system, careful planning and an understanding of the process from the customer perspective is important. Well, the other way is to hire call centre outsourcing services that ensures optimum level of customer satisfaction. At outsourced call centre, there is a team of skilled customer care reps that handle customer complaints across multiple channels.

Boost Customer Support:

There are some cases wherein customers truly need to talk to a professional agent from your support team. To resolve customer queries promptly, your representatives should be empowered with autonomy and latitude. One of the great ways is to choose call centre outsourcing services for your business to tackle customer complaints quickly. At call centre, help desk agents are provided with the autonomy to be creative in resolving customer queries at their end without any restriction of following pre-designed script.

In the Bottom Line

Enticing customers by offering flash discounts to buy again is challenged by the idea that customer loyalty is derived by the providing effortless interaction to the customers. You should focus on building a seamless UX, improved customer engagement and support as low customer efforts results in loyalty.

Tags: Call centre outsourcing services Call centre services Customer services Customer loyalty Customer satisfaction