What makes a customer buy from your company again and again? Is it your company’s reputation and brand, the excellence of your products and services or unbeatable value-to-price ratio? Or something altogether different?
What Is Your Experience?
A recent survey to about 2400 companies found that the above mentioned factors do have a significant impact. In fact, together they constitute a little less than half of all the factors that influence customer loyalty towards your business. But by far, good buying experience has the greatest impact on customer loyalty. As the accompanying chart shows, buying experience represents 53% of the loyalty drivers – making it more important than all the other factors combined.
Elementary, My Dear Watson
Common sense tells you that if your company’s customers find it easy and convenient to buy from your company, they’re much more likely to come back for more. However, if your company does not offer your customers the possibility to buy in a way that pleases them, they will probably vote with their feet very quickly. Thus the fact that buying experience plays such an important role in building customer loyalty is almost obvious when you really think about it.
Let’s Make It Better
How do you improve customer buying experience? One thing is certain – if your sales process isn’t based on the understanding of customers’ purchasing behaviour, your current sales process is of little help here. The result is more likely that buying and selling processes are more or less out of sync and the buying experience is not optimal – or even tolerable.
I Don’t Quite Understand …
In order to improve your customers’ buying experience, you must really understand how your customers want to buy. Different customers will almost certainly also want to buy in a variety of ways, and your sales process should accommodate and offer each customer an equally good buying experience. And to understand how different types of customers are looking to buy, you must first understand what kind of customers your company has.
Only when there’s sufficient information about your company’s customers and their buying behaviour is it possible to customize your company’s sales process to take into account the differences in buying behaviour. This is the only way out of supplier-centric “one size fits all” sales process thinking and towards understanding the buying behaviour and improving the buying experience.
What kind of buying experience does your company offer its customers? Are you sure you’re influencing their loyalty towards your company in a positive way?
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