Keeping Customers: The Key to Customer Retention

What are you doing to keep your customers?

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In a tough economy, businesses focus on holding on to what they have. Some popular tactics are to offer discounts, add-ons and more services. An expensive and ineffective approach. That’s because customer retention is really a function of customer loyalty. And loyalty is an emotion stoked by a relationship.

So how do you create this emotional bond with the customer? The answer is to focus on the experience.
The number one factor in creating customer loyalty is the experience customers have with your business. Not price, not product, not service. Why? Because an experience engages emotions and creates memories, the foundation of a relationship.

First, Identify the emotion you want your customer to feel (other than loyalty). How should customers feel when they do business with you: Happy, excited, important, respected? Next, map out an experience that encourages and enhances that emotion.

Montgomery Chiropractic in Belton, Texas wants their patients to feel hope for a healthier life beyond pain relief. So Dr. Larry Montgomery linearly mapped out the patient experience in five definable stages: preconception, introduction, interaction, purchase, and adoption/referral. In each stage he injected a magic spot, or memorable moment, that would encourage those feelings of hope for patients.

Then, he further mapped out the typical 32 visit patient cycle, injecting key concepts of his life without pain prescription. For example: in visit number six, Dr. Montgomery would introduce a particular exercise into the patient’s home care regimen.

So do you want customer retention? Then form a relationship that creates a loyal emotional bond. Give your customers an emotion to experience and and experience to remember.

Tools to create your own remarkable customer experience:
Design your customer experience around a common concept: The Customer Experience Theme
Map our your customer’s experience while adding magic spots: The Customer Experience Map

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