In this series of blog posts we discussed the strategies and tactics for ensuring success when deploying new technology or projects within your Route to Market channel and the metrics to measure to determine User Adoption success. Getting people onboard is one thing, but keeping them going is another. Retention requires a slightly different view and strategic focus.

Gaining adoption and ensuring onboarding play a vital role in getting the business running however keeping customers coming back for more has a greater impact on overall business success. In essence, loyalty is important for firms to sustain in the long run. Here are some interesting stats to back up this claim:

• The probability of selling to an existing customer is 3x to 35x higher than to a new one
• It costs up to 7x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one
• A 5% increase in customer retention increases profits by 25% – 95%
• Loyal customers spend 67% more than new ones

But how does one gain loyalty? Some steps you can take to build loyalty include:

1. Offer Excellent Customer Service
2. Publish Customer Reviews and Testimonials
3. Be Transparent
4. Ask for feedback
5. Create a Loyalty Program
6. Be reachable to your potential customers
7. Always prioritize your customers
8. Cultivate relationships
9. Take ownership of the problem

In this post, we uncover and unpack our fundamental formula for stickiness – understanding your customer’s deepest darkest desires and needs, building trust and ultimately fostering loyalty so that they can live to continue to buy another day.

1. Understand the Why

Understanding why customers use your product and putting yourself in their shoes is important. The sales team knows it best because they deal with the pain points of your customers daily. Talk to them and see the challenges of your prospects that get them coming to you. This extends to their motivation and goals, giving you key insights to improve user adoption.

By truly interrogating customer perceptions and requirements it is easier to build a meaningful value proposition across each type of customer you serve. What’s their experience when they’re interacting with your particular category or with you as a company? Do they have unmet needs? Would meeting them help develop a better relationship, make them spend more, or whatever it is that you’re trying to drive with them? In doing so, you can meet those needs and solve those pain points. From this understanding it is easier to start to build trust.

2. Build on the Trust

Trusting a person or a brand involves estimations of probabilities of how the person or brand will behave, and is a state of vulnerability for the person that is placing trust in another. Put another way, trust is a feeling of confidence and security in the way an entity will act.

Trust comes from a relationship and it builds over time, with every interaction and at every touchpoint. Over time, someone’s trust in the complete consumer experience with a merchant may be more important than other factors, like selection or price.

Trust seems to influence the satisfaction level and finally influence customer loyalty. Trust also seems to influence perceived customer value and thus influence customer loyalty. However, you can lose trust easily: Over-marketing, irrelevant content or ads, or not offering value in your communications are common ways to rupture the relationship.

3. Keep Adding Value

Brands that are people-centric, that is, those brands that put people before profit, more easily gain the trust of both employees and customers. When customers and employees know that they are personally valued, they are more likely to trust a brand and remain loyal to it, as they recognize that the brand prioritizes relationships over sales.

Through the accumulation of time and engagement, customer’s perceptions are changed. Time and needs shift the goal post, affecting the underlying value proposition. As a result extra value needs to be constantly added to meet these new customer expectations. In this reciprocal trust-based relationship the greater the value, the greater the recompense, and ultimately the bigger the reward for all involved.

Conclusion

Building trust and loyalty among customers is something that takes time and resources. The more ways you can show them they are valued, the more they will trust you and remain loyal to your brand.

MACmobile’s approach to B2B Loyalty is to encourage adoption, drive specific behaviours and foster true loyalty. 

If you are looking at deploying new RTM technology or adding additional touchpoints to your channel, get in touch and we can arrange a deep dive into our best practices and unpack our learned experience.