Building a long-lasting profitable business means building customer loyalty that lasts. How do you get your customers to come back time and again? How do you get them to tell your friends about you? How do you build up so much goodwill that customers will overlook your occasional mistakes? How do you make your customers love you?
Be Undyingly Dedicated to Customer Satisfaction
The best and most successful companies in the world are companies that care deeply about the customer experience.
Amazon.com was not the first company to sell books online. In fact, they were number four or five to come on the market. The reason Amazon dominated the market was because they had a customer-satisfaction focus. They made sure that everyone who came to Amazon was satisfied. Today, they boost a conversion rate of over 12 percent as a result of the brand they built up.
The same can be said of PayPal. PayPal was not the first to launch an online payment system. Many competitors came into the space after PayPal, including eBay, which launched its own competing payment system. People kept coming back to PayPal time and again because PayPal had an incredible focus on making the customer experience smooth and easy. They kept the number of steps you needed to take to a bare minimum and adapted to customer demands, while other competitors failed to do so. Eventually eBay had to shut down their version of the company and acquire PayPal, because it was so clear that PayPal had so much customer loyalty that they couldn’t compete.
An unerring focus on customer satisfaction and the customer experience is the number one most important thing for building customer loyalty.
Ask for Feedback in Multiple Media
Asking for feedback is integral to providing a great customer experience. You need to know what your customers like and don’t like about their experience in order to innovate.
Ask for your customer’s feedback in many different media. The most basic method is to ask for feedback via online surveys, but don’t stop there. Ask for their feedback by telephone and in person.
Ask for feedback from people who bought, from people who might buy but haven’t, and from people who decidedly didn’t buy. Get feedback from everyone. Only with diligent feedback can you build a really great company.
The bottom line is that building a great company means building a brand and a product that customers love. In order to do that, you need to pour all your energy into the customer experience. Everything else, including marketing, comes second to building a brand and product that customers can feel proud to be associated with.
