Improve Customer Loyalty With An Effective POS System
Have you ever wondered why certain products have a very loyal customer base? Some of the major reasons are because the product has sufficient market demand, good product quality, and they provide the best customer service in town. Thus, customer loyalty is critical for your business to achieve consistent business performance and sales growth.
What is customer loyalty?
In the modern era, customer loyalty has become one of the top priorities for corporate and small businesses alike. A loyal customer is the greatest advantage a company can have over its competitors. Customers that are loyal to a single provider are not easily influenced by price or availability. They would rather pay a higher price for the same quality service and product they are accustomed to.
Customer loyalty is often the result of a company consistently meeting and exceeding customer expectations. According to Rare Consulting’s study, 83 percent of customers said their brand loyalty stemmed from trust. In other words, loyalty is about likability and the ability to trust the product and brand. Customers who trust the companies with whom they do business are more likely to purchase again in the future.
Why Loyal Customers Are Essential To Any Business
Customer loyalty has the greatest impact on profitability when compared to other strategies for running a business. A business might have a hard time remaining profitable without its happy customers who continue to buy its products.
New customers are more expensive to acquire and spend less money than loyal, repeat customers. It is critical for business success to keep customers coming back for more. On the contrary, short-term profit grabs tend to be an unsustainable business model.
Loyal customers are simply better for business as they help you grow and maintain high profit margins. Some importance of keeping loyal customers for your business are:
Strong Customer Loyalty Helps Your Company Grow
While it is obvious that returning customers who spend more money are more beneficial to business, there are other, more subtle advantages to having loyal customers. It’s similar to the old leaky bucket analogy.
For a company to remain profitable, it has to continuously acquire new customers, or maintain its relationship with current customers and ensure that they return for more. This is no different from a bucket that is leaking slowly, to ensure the bucket is always full, it has to be constantly filled or the leak hole has the be maintained.
BIG POS’s POS system in Malaysia helps businesses to provide an efficient customer experience and reduces any human mistakes or errors.
Customer loyalty results in higher profits
Investing in improving customer loyalty is one of the best investments a company can make. A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profit as a 10% reduction in operating costs. An alternative to spending less money on customers is to invest in customer retention strategies, as the long-term benefits are worth every penny.
How To Improve Customer Loyalty?
Collect and analyze customer data
Hearing directly from the source is a foolproof way to improve your customer loyalty strategy. It will take longer to cultivate a loyal audience without your customers’ honest feedback. Collect consumer feedback to ensure they enjoy their experience with your brand and will return.
There are several ways to collect your customer feedback to analyze them in the future, one quick and easy way is to utilize the BIG POS Analytics App. Below are 5 simple strategies that you can start using today to collect customer feedback:
- Sending out email surveys
- Monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand
- Accessing and analyzing your website analytics
- Embed a pop-up survey on your site
- Reviewing the chatbox and live chat transcripts
Reward Big Spending Customers
How many of your customers return after their first purchase? If the answer is few, it could be because you don’t reward them for returning. Recognizing and rewarding customers who take consistent action with your brand is one of the best ways to keep that relationship going.
A loyalty program is an excellent way to show your repeat customers that you value their business and want them to return. The possibilities with such rewards programs are limitless. Some businesses use point systems in which customers accumulate points and receive discounts or free products as they accumulate points. Other businesses create tiered programs in which customers advance to a higher level as their spending increases.
Utilize Inventory Management (Give Out Inventory Items As Gifts)
Having an excessive amount of inventory is high on the list of no-nos for retailers. Surplus stock, in addition to taking up valuable backroom or shelf space, ties up capital and can prevent you from reinvesting in your business or purchasing items you actually need.
That is why it is critical to monitor your sales and inventory data on a regular basis. You must monitor product movement in order to make sound purchasing and marketing decisions. At the same time, keeping track of inventory counts allows you to get a handle on your inventory and avoid having too much stock in your store.
This strategy works best with low-cost items. If a product is difficult to sell, consider using it as a giveaway or incentive instead. You could utilize it as an introduction to attract people to sign up for your mailing list, or to increase the value of their basket. For example, “Spend $75 or more and get a free gift”.
This is one of the strategies that businesses can use in their stores if they discover that a particular item is a “dud” but does not come at a high price. You can give it away as a freebie or giveaway in event goodies bags, in exchange for people signing up for your email list or text service list. In doing so, they are essentially deploying the product’s cost as a marketing expense.
Improve Operational Efficiency
Inventory management productivity is increased in a variety of ways when combined with an inventory management module. For one thing, it enables faster and more accurate inventory-purchasing decisions because orders are based on historical sales such as in restaurants, or for ingredient usage data rather than guesswork and hearsay.
Similarly, the inventory control component of a POS system can be programmed to generate re-orders when merchandise or ingredient quantities reach pre-defined levels in many cases. This eliminates the risk of having to scramble for inventory and ensures that the right items are always in stock within your establishment. It also reduces waste and overstocking.
Moreover, technologies such as BIG POS’s iPad POS system in Malaysia can further reduce the effort and time needed for stock count. If you are a business owner, check out BIG POS for a customizable system designed to improve your business operation.