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Three of the Best Ways to Retain Customers and Increase Sales

In my previous post about how to increase sales I mentioned three customer service experiences that literally broke my relationship with these businesses. Today I will dig into three of the best ways to retain customers in your small business so you can increase sales.

 Although there are many more ways to keep customers in your wheel house, these three ways to retain customers will help improve sales if you continually work on them.

Now for a Really Great Customer Service story…

I purchased a piece of luggage from Jos A Bank in our local area under the guise that if anything ever happened to it they would replace it.

Well as life happens, this particular piece of luggage started to have some serious exterior issues with only 20 flights of service. So I brought it back and came to find out that Mr. Bank was no longer in the luggage business and they were in the process of merging with another mens clothing conglomerate.

Fortunately for me the man who sold me the bag was the manager and had some integrity. He went to bat for me and guess what…

He fixed part of the issue and also gave me a credit for $1000 that I could apply to anything in the store! Now that’s what I call customer service and taking care of the customer and going beyond. Considering the luggage cost less than $400, the repair plus the $1000 far exceeded the value that we paid.

Even though this company is not a small business their local store is run like one and they’ll receive my vote for great customer service and retain me as a customer for life.

This leads to what I believe are Three of the Best Ways to Retain Customers: 

A. Give Your Customers a Reason to Come Back to Your Business. Treat your customers like you treat your best friend and always have something to entice them to reenter your world.

B. Cross Train Your Sales and Customer Service Staff. This way you are never without someone in either department.

C. Find and Recruit People Who are Open and Willing to Learn Your Business. It seems that good, quality, trained retail sales and customer people are just becoming harder and harder to find these days. So when you find a really good quality individual, do what you can to support him or her and treat them like family.

Bonus – if you communicate openly with your staff about your expectations and goals, this can also be one of the best ways to retain customers, especially If you are building your business around a brand. This means that you have to make sure the people who work for you understand what brand loyalty is all about or it could mean their jobs and loss of income.

Make sense?

If not – let me know by forwarding me an email here at ClickandMortarblog.com and I’ll do my best to answer your question.

Until next time…

Dave Krygier
Publisher