Customer relations are crucial to the success of your business, not only in financial terms, but also as a way of making your customers feel better. capture the attention of new customers for your products and services and, above all, retain them.
Customer retention: what is it?
In practice, customer retention is your company's ability to maintain and nurture an active and loyal consumer base, in other words, to keep your regular customers and encourage them to continue shopping at your shop or company.
As is clear, successful customer retention strategies will involve, first and foremost, a relationship of trust between business and customer that leads to customer satisfaction at every stage of their buying journey.
This includes, for example, the regular rewarding of loyalty through personalised discounts and promotions, the offer of new products and/or the improvement of existing ones, a concern with their payment methods and mitigating friction at check-out (finalising the purchase with payment).
Once all these aspects are taken care of, the business will nurture long-lasting relationships with its customers and guarantee more repeat purchases and transactions.
How to retain customers: 4 strategies to keep customers loyal
If your business is concerned with customer satisfaction and retention, take note of these four strategies:
1 - Bet on personalised service
After profiling each of your customers with the help of the data they leave you over time, use this information to create the most personalised service possible.
Personalised service doesn't just involve being cordial and calling the customer by their first name. It's also important to offer them discounts, exclusive products and services that make them feel pampered and valued.
Remember, creating unique experiences can not only keep customers loyal to your brand, but can also lead them to pay more for a particular product if they feel valued.
Finally, if your business sells in person and online (omnichannel), it's important to provide careful and attentive service on both sales channels.
In the case of the online channel, consider implementing preferential contacts and chatbots on your website and social networks that can provide all the help customers need 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
2 - Offer loyalty programmes
Either through online loyalty programmes or in a physical shop, you can ensure that your customers remain loyal to your brand.
But beware: these programmes must be made up of benefits that add value to the customer experience and guarantee a significant financial return.
3 - Accept differentiated payment methods in line with customer needs
Especially in e-commerce, the friction at the time of the online check-out can result in cart abandonment and the immediate loss of the customer. To prevent this from happening, it is important that you provide payment methods in line with your customers' habits and the specifics of the online platform where you sell.
For example, if you sell online via a website, you'll need a payment gateway such as REDUNIQ@E-Commerce, a simple integration solution with your sales platform that guarantees you checkout processes with less friction and the possibility of now accepting online payments with cards from the main international issuing systems - Visa and Mastercard.
Already sell online without a website through social media marketplaces, we recommend using the turnkey solution REDUNIQ@Payments which, in practice, allows you to receive online payments by e-mail, SMS and WhatsApp, via Multibanco reference, MB WAY or Visa and Mastercard, quickly and, above all, securely.
From the online sales channel, we're now talking about the face-to-face sales channel.
In this case, statistics tell us that contactless payments are growing and already account for 81% of transactions at REDUNIQ network retailers (data REDUNIQ Insights), which consequently indicates a clear trend towards the use of this payment method and will force you to bet on payment terminals that allow the customer to carry out this type of contactless transaction.
In this case, REDUNIQ offers three state-of-the-art solutions: REDUNIQ Smart, REDUNIQ Easy e REDUNIQ Soft which, among other things, allow you to accept payments by card, contactless, PIN, MB WAY, QR Code, Google Pay and Apple Pay, as well as offering your customers the possibility of paying in instalments up to 6 times without interest via the App Parcela Já com UNICRE.
4 - Ensure agile after-sales support
Concern for your customer's well-being doesn't end the moment the purchase is made.
To increase customer loyalty, we recommend that you follow up all after-sales activities with a clear and detailed communication schedule, sending out satisfaction surveys and discount coupons.
Also, make sure that the returns and exchanges channel is free of charge and, in the case of refunds, that transfers are made as quickly as possible.
How to retain dissatisfied customers?
Even when the strategies we've explained are well implemented, there are always customers who, for one reason or another, end up dissatisfied with the service provided.
In these cases, the first thing to do is to listen to your customers' reasons without making any value judgements. After listening to them, try to find solutions to their problems while offering a discount on a product or access to an exclusive promotion.
To find out if customers are satisfied with the solution you have found, ask them for feedback, thank them for their patience and show them that their opinion was important in making improvements to the service.
Finally, and whenever possible, encourage your customers to leave reviews or evaluations of the service provided or the products purchasedso that potential clients have references, through current clients, about the brand/company.
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