How to Build Customer Loyalty

Building customer loyalty is a hugely important component of growing your business. Unfortunately, most companies follow the wrong strategies when trying to build customer loyalty. Newsletters, reward programs, and trying to delight your customers are common strategies for building loyalty, but they’re not the reason customers keep coming back instead of turning to your competitors.

The Best Way to Build Customer Loyalty

According to the book The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty, the long-standing wisdom for building customer loyalty is to provide products or experiences that delight them. However, when the authors interviewed companies about their experiences and their willingness to switch to new suppliers, they found something strange. Customers who were delighted with the product or service were only slightly more loyal than customers who said the product met their expectations. The data found almost no relationship between customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. That means happy customers are not necessarily loyal customers.

So, what’s going on? If delighting your customers doesn’t produce customer loyalty, what does? To answer this question, the authors looked at what factors drove customer disloyalty. They identified five key drivers of disloyalty.

1. Resolving Issues Requires Multiple Contacts – Customers dislike having to repeatedly contact companies to resolve their issues.
2. Generic Service – Customers don’t like receiving generic service or feeling like they’re being treated like a number instead of a valued client. They also dislike rigid protocols or interactions like when agents are obviously reading from a script.
3. Repeating Information – Customers dislike having to repeat the same information multiple times during their interactions with companies. As CRM software becomes more common, customers increasingly expect companies to maintain records so they don’t have to explain their issue every time they talk to someone.
4. Perceiving that Issue Resolution Requires Additional Effort – Customers don’t like feeling as though they have to put in extra time or effort to resolve an issue. The critical element here is that it’s not the actual time and energy that’s the problem, but the perception of it.
5. Transfers – Customers increasingly dislike having to deal with long wait times or being transferred to multiple agents to resolve an issue.

Four of these drivers of disloyalty speak to the same core principle—reducing customer effort. The thesis of The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty is that providing effortless experiences is the best way to build customer loyalty.

It’s easy to find examples of companies that have succeeded by putting this principle into action. Amazon, famously, has always prioritized the customer experience. It’s known for having a culture of customer-obsession. They pioneered two-day shipping and offer unparalleled product recommendations and personalization. They’ve also unveiled new ways of meeting their customers’ needs by expanding their grocery delivery options, including creating brick-and-mortar stores where people can pay using their online Amazon Prime accounts.

Product returns with Amazon are also famously easy. Customers who want to return a product can use an online form to process their return and then drop off the unboxed item at a collection point. For an online retailer, there is no easier way to process returns. Not including the drop-off point, customers don’t have to talk to any Amazon representatives throughout this process. It’s simple, easy, and puts the customer in control.

Southwest is another company that’s famous for its good customer service. In a time when other airlines are increasingly nickel-and-diming their customers with things like baggage fees, Southwest has stuck to its “bags fly free” policy. It has also embraced a multi-channel approach that better meets customers where they are rather than forcing them down a single avenue to resolve customer complaints. This improves customer service and accelerates the process of reaching a resolution.

Both Amazon and Southwest share something in common—they’re putting their customers in control. For Southwest, baggage fees aren’t just annoying to customers. Unexpected fees after you’re arrived at the airport can feel disempowering. Once they’ve reached the airport, most people don’t really have a choice about paying unexpected baggage fees. Paying these extra fees also provides another layer of hassle to the already annoying and burdensome process of flying. When seen through this context, remaining committed to their policy about not charging for bags is really about improving customer service and providing a more seamless travel experience.

What This Means for B2B Companies

B2B companies have traditionally had a more complicated sales process than B2C companies. Placing a B2B order often involves exchanging multiple phone calls or emails, or generating multiple quotes. B2B customers often have custom negotiated rates or need access to specific inventory. Manufacturers or distributors may also need to check product availability before providing a quote to their customers. In this environment, it can be difficult for B2B companies to provide the types of effortless experiences that drive customer loyalty.

That’s where we come in. At CertiPro, we specialize in exactly the type of technological solutions that provide effortless customer experiences. Our E-Link tool forms a deep integration that synchronizes data between your core business platforms. It creates a two-way sync between Sage ERP and Magento Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, or Shopify. E-Link handles all data connection points for Customer Portals and B2B/B2C eCommerce.

Many of our B2B customers previously struggled with an overly manual sales process. Some didn’t have websites or had websites that lacked eCommerce functionality. That’s as far from an effortless customer experience as you can get. Our E-Link eCommerce integration replaces this reliance on manual orders or manual order processing with a seamless, online solution. It allows our clients to provide their customers with an online ordering experience similar to Amazon or other big B2C online retailers, complete with customer-specific pricing and inventory.

Contact us today to see what CertiPro can do for your business.