How to Build Customer Trust and Loyalty
Many companies underestimate the value of customer trust and loyalty when it comes to driving higher revenue growth. It might sound counterintuitive, but convincing existing customers to return is more important than gaining new ones. This is because the cost of finding new customers is far higher than the cost of selling to existing customers. In fact, returning customers spend 67% more than first-time buyers.
It’s clear that executives need to put customer loyalty at the center of their company’s values, but how do you actually go about doing building customer trust and loyalty? Let’s jump right in!
3 Ways to Build Customer Trust and Customer Loyalty
- Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust
- Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand
- Quality, Quality, Quality
Action #1: Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust
Throughout the customer journey, your brand should meet customers where they are. The more personal you make the customer experience, the more trust you’ll cultivate.
For instance, in the pre-purchase stage, in-store employees should have substantial knowledge about products and understand what customers need. Employees should be trained to create positive interactions from the beginning all the way up to the final moment of purchase. Asking small questions like if a customer found everything they needed—and stepping in if they didn’t—can make a huge impact. Little actions like that help add a nice personal touch to a customer’s experience—and lead to a stronger level of trust!
Action #2: Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand
Trust often leads to loyalty, but your brand has to make the first move. To cement a longstanding relationship of trust, your business needs to show loyalty to customers first.
An effective approach here would be to engage with and respond to customers, because engaged customers are more likely to promote your company than unengaged customers. Actively responding to customer questions, comments, and complaints can grow loyalty by putting a human voice to a brand.
One best practice for engaging with customers in this way is to design an open communication and feedback channel. Of course, we recommend utilizing not just a help center as a method to reach out, but any adequate resource, from employees on the front line to digital surveys. Additionally, you should look to other indirect forms of feedback to understand your customers such as review site data and social media mentions.
Action #3: Quality, Quality, Quality
At the end of the day, even if their customer experience was amazing, if the product doesn’t meet a customer’s expectations, all that work you did to build trust and loyalty is in vain. Customers expect value for what they pay for and no amount of sales gimmicks can hide the truth of your product, so it’s key to know customers’ expectations and develop your product/service to meet or exceed that. After all, loyal customers are coming back for a quality purchase; the positive customer experience is an additional element encouraging that return.
Your customer experience platform is essential to identifying friction points and remedying them to improve customer trust and customer loyalty. We discussed in the section above how it’s important to keep tabs on what your customers are saying about their experience. Once you’ve collected all this feedback data across every channel, you can leverage your customer experience (CX) platform to analyze all that customer feedback and identify the areas in your business that need some attention. Check out this video below to learn how global banking giant, Virgin Money, worked with Pearl-Plaza to understand the most impactful moments in the customer journey.
Now that you’ve learned how to build customer trust and loyalty, read our eBook to learn about how that trust and loyalty can drive cross-sell and upsell opportunities!
