Increasing Customer Loyalty

It is necessarily required for an organization to interact and communicate with customers on a regular basis to increase customer loyalty. In these interactions and communications it is required to learn and determine all individual customer needs and respond accordingly. Following are some important aspects which suppliers should always keep in mind to increase customer loyalty:

1. Emotional attachment: Emotional and sentimental attachment plays a vital role in increasing customer loyalty. Hence it is important for the suppliers to identify the factors which force the customers to get emotionally attached with them and should mould this information accordingly to enhance this emotional relationship. There can be a range of factors for customers that develops these emotional attachment with suppliers, some of which are discussed below:

   a.	Many customers get emotionally attached because of the high name or good image of the supplier in the market. They feel highly elicited in status for having business deals with them which could also substantially upraise their image. This helps in increasing loyalty of customer with that particular supplier unless and until customer finds any other high named supplier who meets all his expectations.
   b.	Some customers will get attached with supplier just because of the excellence in technical aspects of product which also includes best service and healthy organizational culture. These types of customers only believe in the fact that all the products and services work in accordance to them and in an efficacious and efficient way. This attachment results in customer to become loyal.
   c.	Some customers get highly impressed with the overall behavior of supplier. Soft spoken and well mannered executive is always a positive gain for the supplier to get the customers emotionally attached with him. This behavior could also include provision of spontaneous responses in an efficient way. All these aspects can increase customer loyalty to much higher levels.

   
   

2. Supplier’s credibility: Supplier’s credibility helps to elevate customer loyalty. Credibility provides confidence and comfort to the customers regarding the reliability, durability, quality and performance of products and services.

   In industrial sector, the products provided by suppliers are actually used by customers for production purpose.

   Hence unavailability, malfunctioning or low performance of these products could highly affect the profitability in business. By nullifying all these factors and providing high valued service and high end products which are available all the time develops a sense of credibility among the customers. In such case customers develop faith and belief in supplier which obviously increases customer loyalty.

3. Customer satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is the measure of how the needs and responses are collaborated and delivered to excel customer expectation. It can only be attained if the customer has an overall good relationship with the supplier.

   In today’s competitive business marketplace, customer satisfaction is an important performance exponent and basic differentiator of business strategies. However, a satisfied customer may be or may not be loyal but an unsatisfied customer potentially seeks other options and may migrate easily.

   Hence it is important for the supplier to identify dissatisfaction factors and develop corrective measures to cope up with.

   It is often seen that if these corrective measures are implemented successfully to improve satisfaction then satisfaction level increases to a much higher level as compared to a normal satisfied customer.

   A satisfied customer mostly tends to be a loyal customer hence customer satisfaction is an important factor that increases customer loyalty.

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