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How To Keep Your Customers Happy

Loyalty Customers

How To Keep Your Customers Happy

Written by Nidhi Ann Raj for Gaebler Ventures

It is not enough to keep your customers complaint-free. If you expect them to come back again or bring in new customers, you have to constantly keep them happy.

Customers are very hard to please. You may think you have done your best to make them happy, but it may not be enough.

Also making them happy once, does not necessarily mean you keep them happy always. To keep your customers happy, you have to continuously meet or exceed their expectations. To do so, you need to first gauge their expectations. Remember that customers do not always expect the best. What they do expect is to get value for the money they spend on their company or service. Once you understand your customers' expectations, try to meet them in various ways.

The best way to keep your existing customers happy is by acknowledging their loyalty. Loyalty programs have proved to be an effective means of customer retention. It is observed that it is five to ten times more expensive to attract a new customer as against retaining an old one. Offer discounts and freebies, on occasions like their birthday or any other day that may be special to them. These small gestures will definitely delight a loyal customer!. Also try to offer something new each time. Customers can be like small kids, who get bored of their old toys every now and them. Offering something creative and new, will keep them interested in your product.

To analyze how to please your customers, find out what people do wrong in managing customers. From my experience, the one thing that puts me off, is bad customer service. I one recently had to call the customer service of my mobile service provider, around ten times before I got the issue resolved. The result:- I decided to change my service provider with whom I had a relationship of 5 years. Help lines are not made effective by staffing people who speak well or who are friendly. Customers call in for help, so they expect their problem to be solved at the end of the call. You can make a customer happy, if you have responded to his/ her queries effectively or have solved their issues within a 24 hour turn around time. To go that extra mile, you may want to stay in touch with your customers on a regular basis, so that you call them asking if they face issues, before they come to you with complaints.

It does not take a lot of effort to find out how to keep customers happy. Simply place yourself in their shoes and think what you need from your service provider. Offer the same to them and they will be happy and keep coming back for more!

Nidhi Ann Raj is a gifted writer who is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at George Brown College in Toronto Canada, where she is specializing in Marketing and Finance.