Great Customer Service Helps Increase Brand Loyalty

When you walk into a restaurant and the maitre d’ greets you by name and ushers you over to your favorite table – that’s service. When your bank teller not only answers questions, but also pulls up records to make sure you’ve taken advantage of every perk to which you’re entitled – that’s service. And when returning a defective item to a store you get your money back, a sincere apology, AND a discount coupon for your next purchase – you guessed it: that’s service.

Service builds loyalty. That’s why excellent service should be built into every business – whether transactions occur face-to-face or online.

Honored Guests

Owners of big department stores don’t expect to develop a personal relationship with everyone who walks through the door. But publishers of websites – even the most heavily trafficked ones – can make each and every site visitor feel like an honored guest. Websites can be configured to recognize individual users, resulting in a cheery greeting (“Hi, Jonathan!”) at the top of the screen. Even if the website gets it wrong (“Not Jonathan? Sign in under another name.”), this little technological trick can make customers feel welcome, and valued.

Understand Your Customer’s Preferences

There’s an old adage in the marketing world: People don’t buy from you because they understand your business; people buy from you because your business understands them.

Publishers of websites who take full advantage of Internet technology can trace their site visitors’ surfing patterns, not just at a particular site, but all over the Web. This can be used to create a visitor profile, making it possible to channel targeted content to specific people.

Using these tools, it becomes possible to fulfill your customers’ needs before they’ve even been expressed. This creates a strong sense of loyalty – which in turn creates greater site traffic and profitability.

"Your Call Is Important To Us…"

Good service requires creating a mechanism in which customers’ questions and concerns can be dealt with efficiently, in a friendly, polite manner. That means abandoning callers on the seventh level of voice mail hell is (duh!) a major no-no.

Technology can certainly streamline communications, and good service does not require that a live human being field every request. But it’s important to keep multiple modes of communication available, so every customer – no matter how old fashioned – feels noticed and taken care of.

Conduit – Always At Your Service

When a site publisher creates a Conduit toolbar and offers it as a free download, this creates an “always open” channel for communication and service. Toolbars increase site loyalty by serving as a platform for user recognition, and by serving up a dynamically changing array of features, specially suited to user preferences. Moreover, Conduit toolbars are a clickable vehicle for instant communication between customers and your site team, because they sit in the browser window whenever subscribers are online, even when they are viewing other sites.

With Conduit, it’s easy to show your customers that you’re always thinking creatively about how to serve them better. And that’s the kind of service that generates long-term loyalty.