What is customer loyalty?
Customer loyalty is understood as all activities of a company to maintain the relationship with its customers and prevent them from switching to the competition. Only when customer satisfaction If available, customers will be willing to continue to buy from the company in the future. Accordingly, customer loyalty measures are there to promote and maintain customer loyalty.
What measures are there to increase customer loyalty?
Customer loyalty offers many advantages and the successful basis is, in addition to a good product or service, the creation of a consistent positive customer experience and the additional offer of a excellent customer services. After all, companies in many industries can no longer stand out from the competition with product offerings or services alone. Useful measures to build and maintain customer loyalty are presented below:
1. Creating a positive and unique customer experience
In an environment where competition is so fiercely competitive, companies need to find more and more innovative and personalized ways to successfully reach customers. Especially in areas such as e-commerce, the financial sector or the tourism industry - just to name a few examples - the competition is not sleeping. The customer experience (also known as customer experience) is therefore of great importance today and describes how customers perceive a brand and how they interact with it.
So if a company manages to generate many positive interactions with customers, it creates a positive customer experience, which at the same time strengthens customer loyalty.
After all, the experience is what customers actually remember and binds them to the company's brand.
2. Optimizing the user experience (UX)/usability on the company website
Companies should ensure that their website is intuitive to use, offers short loading times and enables customers to quickly find what they are looking for. This includes, for example, that the shopping cart should always be displayed at the top right of the website, as buyers are used to. The ordering process should also be easy, because the check-out in particular often leads to customers canceling their purchase. Integrating as many payment methods as possible also offers customers convenience and ensures that they continue to enjoy shopping with the company.
Example: A customer has chosen a product on the website and adds it to the shopping cart. Once in the ordering process, the customer realizes that payment can only be made by credit card. However, the customer does not have a credit card and therefore cancels the purchase process.
3. The use of social media
Companies should definitely be active on multiple channels in order to reach all of their target groups. Social media serve as a helpful platform for interacting with customers and exchanging ideas. Through dialogue, customers are more involved, can directly share their questions, praise and criticism, and the company receives direct feedback. Companies can share content in a variety of forms — including images, videos, texts, surveys, or other content — and offer users the opportunity to respond to them. User reactions usually represent “likes”, forwarding content, or even leaving comments. Social media also offer users the option to contact other users — in this case the company — privately using direct messages. It is important that all inquiries and comments are answered as quickly and easily as possible so that customers never have the feeling that they are not being heard.
Example: The company shares a product on Instagram in the form of an image that recently came onto the market and asks how it was received by its users. A buyer of the product leaves a comment below the shared content and, in frustration, informs the company that she doesn't understand the full feature. The company can now thank you for the feedback and respond with a link to the product explanation page.
4. Cross-selling to increase customer loyalty
With cross-selling, customers are offered suitable additional products. Not only can this increase sales — it also satisfies the needs of customers by directly viewing several products from the respective segment and thus not having to research further. This offers customers convenience, increases customer satisfaction and thus also loyalty to the company.
Example: A customer opts for a new smartphone online, then suitable additional products, such as headphones, protective films and charging cables, are immediately suggested to her - so she doesn't have to look for suitable items on other websites.
5. The use of bonus programs
Bonus programs remain a useful tool for customer loyalty. Almost all large companies today offer bonus programs for their customers, because with the help of small monetary contributions, customers can be effectively tied to a company. It is important to make them easy to understand so that customers quickly understand how to use them and enjoy using them. Nowadays, customer cards are often used, which are often available in apps.
6. More personalization to increase customer loyalty
Customers want to feel understood and not be one of many buyers. On the one hand, companies can send personalized newsletters or personalized offers for birthdays in order to maintain relationships with customers. On the other hand, displaying personalized banners or products that are identified in the search history based on customer interests is ideal for improving personalization. In this way, customers feel understood, while shopping on the company's own website is also made easier for them.
7. Installing a feedback option
It is important to constantly obtain feedback from customers in order to signal that the customer's opinion is valued and relevant. At the same time, the company also benefits from receiving direct information from the customer. Companies should always thank you for helpful feedback and ask specifically for possible improvements or ideas for further development. In this way, they effectively contribute to customer satisfaction and lay a foundation for long-term customer loyalty.
8. Excellent customer service as the key to a positive customer relationship
Service quality plays an important role in increasing customer loyalty, which has become an integral part of it. To increase customer loyalty through excellent service quality, there are further measures that should be taken and which are used to support traditional methods such as telephone and e-mail.
Consumers become more impatient and, as a result, dissatisfied when they don't get the desired added value after contacting customer service — they are frustrated and, in the worst case, turn away from the company. For this reason, timely and individual processing of customer concerns is becoming increasingly important in order to meet increasing customer expectations and stand out from the competition.
A variety of companies now offer chatbots, which are available around the clock and provide answers to questions in real time (more on this in the next chapter)
The importance of conversational marketing for customer loyalty
What is conversational marketing?
In contrast to traditional marketing, which is more like giving consumers frontal sound, conversational marketing means direct interaction with customers in the form of conversations. With conversational marketing, companies give visitors to their website the opportunity to communicate with them directly — around the clock. It also aims to build relationships through meaningful conversations with consumers and make the buying experience as easy as possible. Tools such as live chat, chatbots and messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, are used to provide the user with a smooth journey.
Using Conversational Marketing to Strengthen Customer Loyalty
With direct customer communications in the form of dialogs that are available in real time and around the clock, Conversational Marketing offers an exceptional customer experience. Because today, customers expect to be able to get in touch with companies at any time. In addition to customer satisfaction, conversational marketing promotes customer loyalty and thus makes an important contribution to maintaining strong customer loyalty. Conversational marketing should take place through conversations, although the company does not necessarily have to provide a human interlocutor. Through two-way communication, conversational marketing creates a satisfying and valuable customer experience and has thus become the preferred form of customer interaction in the digital age. By using artificial intelligence (AI), conversational AI even makes it possible to conduct a conversation or linguistic interaction between humans and machines automatically. Chatbots serve as a mouthpiece for Conversational AI. Nowadays, conversational marketing has become an integral part of strengthening customer loyalty through excellent experiences.
To what extent is customer loyalty strengthened using a chatbot?
In a time as fast-paced as today, consumers want to save their precious time. They have no interest in spending hours reading through forums or being stuck in phone queues. Customers expect simple and efficient ways to solve their concerns. At the same time, it is best to use this service at any time and conveniently from anywhere — whether at home on the sofa or even quickly on the go.
Chatbots meet all of these needs, and their implementation is becoming more customer satisfaction leads and, as a positive consequence, creates a bond with the company. The personal and at the same time virtual assistant appears as a chat partner who is able to better understand customer concerns and offer suitable solutions. Instant messengers, such as WhatsApp, are among the most popular today anyway and most popular most frequently used applications.
The numerous benefits of using chatbots to strengthen customer loyalty are shown below:
- No waiting times, 24/7 availability, scalability: Whereas traditional customer service is characterized by long waiting times and limited availability, chatbot solutions are flexible and can be used at any time — even outside business hours. In addition, chatbots are not overloaded by activity spikes or peak phases and can process numerous customer concerns simultaneously and without waiting times — scalability is therefore ensured. Through individual and timely customer service, they prevent dissatisfied customers from moving away and thus strengthen customer loyalty in the long term.
- Automated, personalized answers in real time: Intelligent bots offer automated answers to consumer inquiries and can use AI to play out personalized conversations. Furthermore, the use of artificial intelligence helps to meet the previously mentioned customer requirements. An AI chatbot can therefore help a company provide a fast and comprehensive service by automatically answering customer inquiries. The quick and uncomplicated response to the request increases customer satisfaction and thus promotes the relationship with the company.
- Analysis function: Chatbots can also be used to learn more about their customers. Questions that are entered into the tool by users can be analyzed in the background and used for improvements to answer inquiries. Personalization in particular ensures that the customer feels understood and promotes the relationship with the brand and the company behind it. The chatbot not only communicates with customers, but also generates exciting user insights that can be used for further customer loyalty measures, Cross-selling, for example. In this way, the chatbot can suggest personalized offers to the customer using its previous inputs and previously collected data.
- Personalized and human-like answers: With the help of personalized and human-like conversations, chatbots offer customers an exceptional conversation experience. From an appealing greeting to customers to assistance with individual questions or personal recommendations, they provide customers with an exceptional user experience.
AI in particular makes it possible for the chatbot to interact individually with users and to suggest alternatives even for unknown topics, or to suggest alternatives to the user using the Human Takeovers forward to a real person via email or live chat.
- Relief for customer service: At the same time, chatbots significantly reduce the burden on customer service, as a large proportion of inquiries are answered live in a matter of seconds. Even if the chatbot does not have a suitable answer, it can leave a call back request for the customer. The feedback to the customer that their request has been registered and is being dealt with promptly by an employee also has a positive effect on the user experience and thus on customer loyalty. As a result, the service team can be deployed to deal with more complex and emotional issues and provide high-quality advice.
- Feedback function and adjustment of the service: There is hardly anything more valuable than honest customer feedback. Especially with the help of conversation tools such as the chatbot, it is possible for companies to offer customers a simple feedback tool. As a result, customers not only feel valued because their opinion counts, the company can also draw valuable conclusions from the feedback given and improve the service at the same time.
Conclusion: Why chatbots are important for customer loyalty
Customer loyalty offers many advantages and companies in many industries can no longer stand out from the competition with product offerings or services alone. By using conversational marketing, a satisfying and valuable customer experience can be created. Nowadays, conversational marketing in the form of chatbots has become an integral part of maintaining or expanding customer loyalty and, with the use of AI and a good mix of human service, can offer great added value to customer satisfaction and loyalty and establish and maintain a long-term relationship.
