You combed your hair and shined your shoes, you took them to the big dance and gave them a ring. They said yes and the wedding was amazing. They loved those thoughtful things you did for them and told all their friends about how well you treated them.
Then the honeymoon ended and the little quirks about you that they thought were cute at first became slightly annoying. After a while they get to a place where maybe they cannot remember why they liked you to begin with.
They dont hate you, that would be an easy decision to leave. But they dont love you like they did before. Maybe it’s because you have been out too late with other customers or maybe they just have not heard from you for a while. Regardless a feeling of apathy towards you is slowly creeping over them and it’s starting to itch.
You are a business, and your relationship with your customer may be in trouble. Ask yourself:
- What value add (extra benefit without additional cost) have I delivered to my customer lately?
- Have I communicated (not spammed their email) with them lately?
- How would they score their last interaction with us? Did we provide +1?
- Have I reminded them lately why they chose us?
- Are there any new guys on the block they may be checking out? Have I given them ample reason not to stray?
If you don’t like the answers to those questions, it’s time to re-engage your customers. According to the business books customer retention / reducing churn is vital to the health of your business. Some companies make it so hard to leave (you know who you are and you should be drinking hot lead to save the world from your further treachery) as a means to keep churn down, the smart ones have a systematic and personalized way of keeping their customers paying by reminding them why they made a good choice in the first place. (plug: our client GetSatisfaction is dedicated to helping you make and keep happy customers)
Here at page.ly we do our best with our small staff to make everyone feel like they are our only customer and reinforce our value proposition at every turn. We want to make sure our customers have us top of mind for all things pertaining to the security and management of their WordPress site, and try to show them in meaningful ways how we are still working for them. A couple examples:
- Our DNS upgrades. Free value add to them for rock solid DNS
- Continuous improvements to the system and interface.
- Showcase and interviews with our customers (come on.. EVERYONE loves a good ego stroke)
- Timely and informative updates regarding system status
- No Hacks, EVER
- Treating customers as we would like to be treated
- and all the other things; contests on twitter, free shirts, free ipads, wordcamp tickets, generally not sucking.
What are ways your business keeps that hot flame of customer loyalty burning? Please share in the comments. Best answer chosen by me wins a free Pagely T. BOOM!
Yeah, this is good stuff. I think overdelivering at multiple points is the way to go.
when someone becomes a customer, we give them some free “cheat sheets” to getting their site going, and then we call them within 10 minutes to welcome them.
After they’ve been with us a month, they get a usps shipped package with a framed picture of their website, and its purpose.
We call everyone once a quarter to help – not to sell.
The video business will be doing more of that – and better.