Everyone wants their customers to come back and keep coming back. Luckily, repeat business in service industries is more common than in any other industry. Whether you're cleaning commercial offices or repairing pools, mowing lawns or servicing HVAC systems, your customers will repeatedly require the same services, providing you give them what they're looking for.

Building customer loyalty is the easiest and cheapest way to drive revenue. Return customers cost less per sale, because you're investing less in marketing and customer support to make a new sale. Once a customer trusts your work, they're more inclined to buy from you again. Customer loyalty is crucial because once you establish a relationship, you become the go to provider for that person.

At the same time, building customer loyalty is a lot easier than many people think. It’s not about offering the best deal or the cheapest product or even the highest quality service, it’s often about engaging with customers. If you can consistently engage and create positive connections, you will build relationships and therefore customer loyalty. But, it’s also important to keep in mind that your customer is bringing you value, they are a commodity and they have to be treated well in any relationship. It's like going on a date. It doesn’t matter how much of a connection you have if you don’t do or say the right things. Instead, you have to work to create a positive experience and build up good interactions so that they keep coming back.

Most businesses have access to nearly unlimited customer feedback. Few of them ever take advantage. With social media, online reviews, and face-to-face discussion and feedback, you have the opportunity to collect the data you need to truly understand what the customer wants. And, with a little research, you can collect data left on your competitor's pages, forums, and websites as well.

Solutions like WorkWave Service are designed with the customer in mind to make it easy to submit feedback from any device they're on. Customers get to inform you on how they appreciated or didn't appreciate your services, and you get valuable insight into how customers perceive your services. Getting unbiased opinions of team or your own performance can be painful, but it can allow you to make changes or offer the training and information your teams and field technicians need to truly excel.

Look at some of the reviews on your social media pages or some of the feedback on your website. Negative reviews are actually more valuable here than positive ones because they tell you what to work on and improve.

Identifying what customers are unhappy with or that they are not finding solutions for gives you clear avenues to improve, so you can directly invest in creating a better solution for your customers. You can be open about this, introducing new services or changes to policy as a direct result of customer feedback, or simply introduce it and wait for customers to notice.

Customer profiling or creating buyer personas is a lot like creating an imaginary character for each major type of buyer in your business life. Why? Recognizing your different types of customers and their individual goals and drivers will help you to create unique services and tactics that will keep each of those customers coming back. While buyer personas are most often used in marketing, they can create incredibly valuable guidelines for offering recommendations, services, and follow-ups for individual clients.

Sit down and put yourself in your customer's shoes. Chances are, you can define your customers based on different profiles, needs, wants, and even demographics like income, age, and expectations.

You can likely see how these buyer personas could help you to identify where and how to approach customers. If you know 'who' you're dealing with, or at least have a rough idea of what they want and what their problems are, you have a much better basis to offer them the experience and service that will delight them.

Sometimes customers will go to your business hoping to use your services once and never again. But, how do you specifically get these one-time customers to keep coming back? One of the easiest and most-utilized methods is to offer incentive in the form of a discount, coupon, or special deal for returning customers. Importantly, while these incentives can be costly to you, they will increase the chance of your customer coming back again. For example, SumAll showed that a customer who returns 3 times is 57% likely to return a fourth time. ⁶

However, it is important to approach incentives with care. Customer profiling tools work extremely well here, because you can better target incentives and offers. Tailoring incentives to the customer’s previous purchase is always a good idea.

The hardest part of building customer loyalty is simply getting the single-purchase customer to come back a second time. Service-industry businesses have an advantage here, because you can work with the fact that your customer will likely need services again. Whether it’s maintenance, a clean house, or changing filters, you can capitalize on your knowledge of the customer’s recurring needs to make them an offer and incentivize them to return.

X Company has completed a roof inspection for Jeff and Lynda. The two are new homeowners and don’t really know how to take care of their home. Following the roof inspection, the technician recommends several repairs to fix a leak in the attic and offers to clean the gutters. With everything completed, the technician verifies that the couple is happy with the work and leaves. The next day, an X Company representative calls to verify that the work is satisfactory and sends the invoice. With it, they include a slip asking if the customer would like to receive a reminder for a fall inspection before winter, 6 months later with a 15% discount. The couple opt in, and 6 months later, receive a snail-mail and email coupon for a roof inspection and repairs, with a 15% discount. They repeat their purchase.

Using Loyalty Programs and Subscriptions

Many services fit very neatly into subscriptions, with recurring purchases and contracts. Signing a contract for a specific length of service guarantees income for a certain period, allowing you to cut costs by reducing risk. You can pass these benefits on to consumers as direct incentive to sign up. This tactic works especially well for cleaning services, landscaping and yard maintenance, and other frequently recurring services. Your biggest concern is to present loyalty programs and options as an offer or a perk for customers, so they think they have the option of getting a good deal because they’re a loyal customer.

Not every service business can benefit from loyalty programs or subscription-based offerings, but many can. If you are one of them, the goal is to incentivize those concerned about price to commit to coming back, providing they need your services long-term and reminding existing customers that they still need your services. Most importantly, discounting your services likely costs less than the total advertising to gain a new customer so you’re still saving money.

Take a minute and open a Google page. Search for your business. Everything you see on the first 2-3 pages of Google and on your social media is what your customers will be seeing. Anyone can find anything they want about your brand. A single bad response to a review can brand you as unprofessional and unworthy of business for the near future.

Brand reputation is increasingly hard to control. Customers each have their own platforms and their own ability to share anything they want to an audience that can include the entire web.

Brand management is about proactively working to control your brand image by actively ensuring that customers have a good experience and actively working to solve problems when customers don't. Most importantly, if you actively solve a problem for a customer, they'll be more satisfied and more loyal than they ever would if you just apologized or even if you just did your job well. That doesn’t mean you should create problems to solve, but it does mean being proactive and being willing to invest in your customer’s happiness.

Your brand is becoming increasingly more important. Previous generations of consumers cared more about what you sell than who you are, but that is rapidly changing. Today's consumers care about who you are, what you do with your money, your professionalism, and even their friend's and peer's opinions and experiences. While this does mean that you can rely less on quality services and products as a primary sales point, it does mean that you can work to build a reputation or brand that customers buy from. Building trust and credibility are two key factors.

What this means for you is that unhappy customers present both more risk and more opportunity than ever before. You likely already know that customers don't usually see doing your job well as a reason to stay loyal to your brand unless your competitors are incompetent. But unhappy customers give you the opportunity to wow, to follow up and make customers happy before they feel they need to go online and complain. The thing is, those same customers who would have talked bad about you online will rave about you if you solve their problems and they will do your work for you, preemptively building trust to create more loyal customers.

Your customer's time is money in your and their pocket. Many customers take time off from work, avoid to-do lists, and even sit and wait for your service agents. Being honest and reliable with your time, actions, and quotes will help you to build long-term relationships with your customers.

Start tracking total time spent on the job and use that to improve your prediction timetables. If you know how long similar projects took you'll have a better basis on which to gauge an estimate.

If you expect you might run slightly late, a quick call to the customer to let them know is also helpful.

Honesty and reliability also pertains to quotes and making mistakes. Speak with the customer and clearly explain the challenge, and offer solutions. Most customers don't want to complain about you. Don’t give them a reason to. Actively manage your brand and quickly solving problems for unhappy consumers goes a long way towards driving customer loyalty – on an individual as well as a community basis.

If public reviews aren’t enough, use WorkWave to send private review requests, where customers are more likely to submit completely unbiased feedback.

Identifying what customers are unhappy with or that they are not finding solutions for gives you clear avenues to improve, so you can directly invest in creating a better solution for your customers. You can be open about this, introducing new services or changes to policy as a direct result of customer feedback, or simply introduce it and wait for customers to notice.

The largest driver of customer loyalty is not quality of service (although that is essential), it's how your technicians, field agents, and staff directly interact with your customers. This means that professionalism and delivering on promises matter more than anything. Customers are accustomed to being over promised results and under delivered on, if you give them someone who exceeds their expectations, you will drive loyalty.

Customers don't think good service is a selling point, it's what they're paying you for. More importantly, if you simply meet needs, customers won't differentiate you from competitors. You have to excel and over deliver, and understanding pain points, or what your customer really needs, is crucial to that.

Does that mean you can go cheaper? Not really. Surprisingly, only about 9% of decision making is based on similar price-point comparisons. In short, you'd have to dramatically undercut competitors to actually make a difference. Customers don't want the cheapest option, they want the best for their money. If you can deliver value through face to face interactions, you'll have hit the 'sweet spot' of building customer loyalty.

Education is a primary key to adding value. Customers value when the people they interact with are educated and can intelligently look at situations and offer solutions. For example, making a recommendation on a product that will help the customer based on personal experience provides value. Delivering this insight also builds loyalty. This is especially important in service and maintenance industries where small helpful hints can save homeowners a lot of money.

Face-to-Face marketing is the concept of using direct actions and positive brand interactions to drive repeat sales. And it requires teaching your staff and field teams to be polite, to bring value, to be knowledgeable about products and offerings, and to know how to offer the best value to the homes they're visiting.

If you know what your customer wants, even if they don't know it yet, you can sell it to them. Your ability to identify those pain points or the story behind the story, will define your ability to give the customer what they really want, a solution that's perfectly aligned with their needs and budget.

The largest driver of customer loyalty is not quality of service (although that is essential), it's how your technicians, field agents, and staff directly interact with your customers. This means that professionalism and delivering on promises matter more than anything. Customers are accustomed to being over promised results and under delivered on, if you give them someone who exceeds their expectations, you will drive loyalty.

We've discussed it previously. Businesses often think that performing their job to a high standard is superior and deserving of commendation. Customers often feel as though this is 'just doing their job', or what they were paid to do.

If you want to be remembered, you must go above and beyond. That doesn't mean spending more, doing whatever the customer wants, or otherwise adding unnecessary cost and hardship to yourself. Instead, it's about paying attention, using small moments to deliver value, keeping your promises, and empowering the customer. Actively trying to make your customers happy, whether with advice and recommendations, tips to get a better deal, timely reminders to adhere to city regulation, or even a flexible service that meets the customer's needs will make a difference. And, it will keep customers coming back.

The best way to connect and to delight the customer is to give them personal interaction. Whether you are building a service package for this customer from scratch, keeping a customer informed that you are running late, or giving progress updates as you go, customers want to be valued.

Providing adequate training and information to field agents and technicians is crucial for your business environment. Hiring workers who are positive and outgoing and able to create relationships with customers. Instill trustworthiness, reliability, and empathy.

The internet gives most people more opportunity to research and decide what they want than ever before. Sometimes customers will call and ask for exactly what you're offering, and it will perfectly match those needs. Other times, customers need help, and not always because they can't figure out what they want but often because your website, brochure, and offerings don't precisely meet their needs.

Customer centricity is the concept of designing every aspect of your business around the customer. After all, that's what business is about. Even the person driving the truck must keep the customer in mind, because their timeliness, or lack of it, will dramatically impact the customer's experience. But customer centricity also means understanding what customers want and why.

Retaining customers and building customer loyalty may seem expensive, but the Chartered Institute of Marketing suggests it's 4-10 times cheaper to invest in customer loyalty than customer acquisition.1 As we reviewed in the opening chapter of this book, it's also easier to sell to a return customer than a new one. Hopefully you now have a better idea of how to build customer loyalty to reduce churn and build repeat customers. These best practices go over some of our key points.

Loyal customers are hard to come by, but once you've convinced a customer that they can trust you, they will come back again and again. In this book, we've reviewed the various tactics that promote customers to trust you, many of which extend well beyond offering good service and into honesty, integrity, and treating customers like you care. If you can consistently offer personal, empathetic service, connect with your customers in a meaningful way, and solve their problems first and sell later, you will build meaningful relationships that last.

Everyone wants their customers to come back and keep coming back. Luckily, repeat business in service industries is more common than in any other industry. Whether you're cleaning commercial offices or repairing pools, mowing lawns or servicing HVAC systems, your customers will repeatedly require the same services, providing you give them what they're looking for.

Building customer loyalty is the easiest and cheapest way to drive revenue. Return customers cost less per sale, because you're investing less in marketing and customer support to make a new sale. Once a customer trusts your work, they're more inclined to buy from you again. Customer loyalty is crucial because once you establish a relationship, you become the go to provider for that person.

At the same time, building customer loyalty is a lot easier than many people think. It’s not about offering the best deal or the cheapest product or even the highest quality service, it’s often about engaging with customers. If you can consistently engage and create positive connections, you will build relationships and therefore customer loyalty. But, it’s also important to keep in mind that your customer is bringing you value, they are a commodity and they have to be treated well in any relationship. It's like going on a date. It doesn’t matter how much of a connection you have if you don’t do or say the right things. Instead, you have to work to create a positive experience and build up good interactions so that they keep coming back.

Most businesses have access to nearly unlimited customer feedback. Few of them ever take advantage. With social media, online reviews, and face-to-face discussion and feedback, you have the opportunity to collect the data you need to truly understand what the customer wants. And, with a little research, you can collect data left on your competitor's pages, forums, and websites as well.

Solutions like WorkWave Service are designed with the customer in mind to make it easy to submit feedback from any device they're on. Customers get to inform you on how they appreciated or didn't appreciate your services, and you get valuable insight into how customers perceive your services. Getting unbiased opinions of team or your own performance can be painful, but it can allow you to make changes or offer the training and information your teams and field technicians need to truly excel.

Look at some of the reviews on your social media pages or some of the feedback on your website. Negative reviews are actually more valuable here than positive ones because they tell you what to work on and improve.

Identifying what customers are unhappy with or that they are not finding solutions for gives you clear avenues to improve, so you can directly invest in creating a better solution for your customers. You can be open about this, introducing new services or changes to policy as a direct result of customer feedback, or simply introduce it and wait for customers to notice.

Customer profiling or creating buyer personas is a lot like creating an imaginary character for each major type of buyer in your business life. Why? Recognizing your different types of customers and their individual goals and drivers will help you to create unique services and tactics that will keep each of those customers coming back. While buyer personas are most often used in marketing, they can create incredibly valuable guidelines for offering recommendations, services, and follow-ups for individual clients.

Sit down and put yourself in your customer's shoes. Chances are, you can define your customers based on different profiles, needs, wants, and even demographics like income, age, and expectations.

You can likely see how these buyer personas could help you to identify where and how to approach customers. If you know 'who' you're dealing with, or at least have a rough idea of what they want and what their problems are, you have a much better basis to offer them the experience and service that will delight them.

Sometimes customers will go to your business hoping to use your services once and never again. But, how do you specifically get these one-time customers to keep coming back? One of the easiest and most-utilized methods is to offer incentive in the form of a discount, coupon, or special deal for returning customers. Importantly, while these incentives can be costly to you, they will increase the chance of your customer coming back again. For example, SumAll showed that a customer who returns 3 times is 57% likely to return a fourth time. ⁶

However, it is important to approach incentives with care. Customer profiling tools work extremely well here, because you can better target incentives and offers. Tailoring incentives to the customer’s previous purchase is always a good idea.

The hardest part of building customer loyalty is simply getting the single-purchase customer to come back a second time. Service-industry businesses have an advantage here, because you can work with the fact that your customer will likely need services again. Whether it’s maintenance, a clean house, or changing filters, you can capitalize on your knowledge of the customer’s recurring needs to make them an offer and incentivize them to return.

X Company has completed a roof inspection for Jeff and Lynda. The two are new homeowners and don’t really know how to take care of their home. Following the roof inspection, the technician recommends several repairs to fix a leak in the attic and offers to clean the gutters. With everything completed, the technician verifies that the couple is happy with the work and leaves. The next day, an X Company representative calls to verify that the work is satisfactory and sends the invoice. With it, they include a slip asking if the customer would like to receive a reminder for a fall inspection before winter, 6 months later with a 15% discount. The couple opt in, and 6 months later, receive a snail-mail and email coupon for a roof inspection and repairs, with a 15% discount. They repeat their purchase.

Using Loyalty Programs and Subscriptions

Many services fit very neatly into subscriptions, with recurring purchases and contracts. Signing a contract for a specific length of service guarantees income for a certain period, allowing you to cut costs by reducing risk. You can pass these benefits on to consumers as direct incentive to sign up. This tactic works especially well for cleaning services, landscaping and yard maintenance, and other frequently recurring services. Your biggest concern is to present loyalty programs and options as an offer or a perk for customers, so they think they have the option of getting a good deal because they’re a loyal customer.

Not every service business can benefit from loyalty programs or subscription-based offerings, but many can. If you are one of them, the goal is to incentivize those concerned about price to commit to coming back, providing they need your services long-term and reminding existing customers that they still need your services. Most importantly, discounting your services likely costs less than the total advertising to gain a new customer so you’re still saving money.

Take a minute and open a Google page. Search for your business. Everything you see on the first 2-3 pages of Google and on your social media is what your customers will be seeing. Anyone can find anything they want about your brand. A single bad response to a review can brand you as unprofessional and unworthy of business for the near future.

Brand reputation is increasingly hard to control. Customers each have their own platforms and their own ability to share anything they want to an audience that can include the entire web.

Brand management is about proactively working to control your brand image by actively ensuring that customers have a good experience and actively working to solve problems when customers don't. Most importantly, if you actively solve a problem for a customer, they'll be more satisfied and more loyal than they ever would if you just apologized or even if you just did your job well. That doesn’t mean you should create problems to solve, but it does mean being proactive and being willing to invest in your customer’s happiness.

Your brand is becoming increasingly more important. Previous generations of consumers cared more about what you sell than who you are, but that is rapidly changing. Today's consumers care about who you are, what you do with your money, your professionalism, and even their friend's and peer's opinions and experiences. While this does mean that you can rely less on quality services and products as a primary sales point, it does mean that you can work to build a reputation or brand that customers buy from. Building trust and credibility are two key factors.

What this means for you is that unhappy customers present both more risk and more opportunity than ever before. You likely already know that customers don't usually see doing your job well as a reason to stay loyal to your brand unless your competitors are incompetent. But unhappy customers give you the opportunity to wow, to follow up and make customers happy before they feel they need to go online and complain. The thing is, those same customers who would have talked bad about you online will rave about you if you solve their problems and they will do your work for you, preemptively building trust to create more loyal customers.

Your customer's time is money in your and their pocket. Many customers take time off from work, avoid to-do lists, and even sit and wait for your service agents. Being honest and reliable with your time, actions, and quotes will help you to build long-term relationships with your customers.

Start tracking total time spent on the job and use that to improve your prediction timetables. If you know how long similar projects took you'll have a better basis on which to gauge an estimate.

If you expect you might run slightly late, a quick call to the customer to let them know is also helpful.

Honesty and reliability also pertains to quotes and making mistakes. Speak with the customer and clearly explain the challenge, and offer solutions. Most customers don't want to complain about you. Don’t give them a reason to. Actively manage your brand and quickly solving problems for unhappy consumers goes a long way towards driving customer loyalty – on an individual as well as a community basis.

If public reviews aren’t enough, use WorkWave to send private review requests, where customers are more likely to submit completely unbiased feedback.

Identifying what customers are unhappy with or that they are not finding solutions for gives you clear avenues to improve, so you can directly invest in creating a better solution for your customers. You can be open about this, introducing new services or changes to policy as a direct result of customer feedback, or simply introduce it and wait for customers to notice.

The largest driver of customer loyalty is not quality of service (although that is essential), it's how your technicians, field agents, and staff directly interact with your customers. This means that professionalism and delivering on promises matter more than anything. Customers are accustomed to being over promised results and under delivered on, if you give them someone who exceeds their expectations, you will drive loyalty.

Customers don't think good service is a selling point, it's what they're paying you for. More importantly, if you simply meet needs, customers won't differentiate you from competitors. You have to excel and over deliver, and understanding pain points, or what your customer really needs, is crucial to that.

Does that mean you can go cheaper? Not really. Surprisingly, only about 9% of decision making is based on similar price-point comparisons. In short, you'd have to dramatically undercut competitors to actually make a difference. Customers don't want the cheapest option, they want the best for their money. If you can deliver value through face to face interactions, you'll have hit the 'sweet spot' of building customer loyalty.

Education is a primary key to adding value. Customers value when the people they interact with are educated and can intelligently look at situations and offer solutions. For example, making a recommendation on a product that will help the customer based on personal experience provides value. Delivering this insight also builds loyalty. This is especially important in service and maintenance industries where small helpful hints can save homeowners a lot of money.

Face-to-Face marketing is the concept of using direct actions and positive brand interactions to drive repeat sales. And it requires teaching your staff and field teams to be polite, to bring value, to be knowledgeable about products and offerings, and to know how to offer the best value to the homes they're visiting.

If you know what your customer wants, even if they don't know it yet, you can sell it to them. Your ability to identify those pain points or the story behind the story, will define your ability to give the customer what they really want, a solution that's perfectly aligned with their needs and budget.

The largest driver of customer loyalty is not quality of service (although that is essential), it's how your technicians, field agents, and staff directly interact with your customers. This means that professionalism and delivering on promises matter more than anything. Customers are accustomed to being over promised results and under delivered on, if you give them someone who exceeds their expectations, you will drive loyalty.

We've discussed it previously. Businesses often think that performing their job to a high standard is superior and deserving of commendation. Customers often feel as though this is 'just doing their job', or what they were paid to do.

If you want to be remembered, you must go above and beyond. That doesn't mean spending more, doing whatever the customer wants, or otherwise adding unnecessary cost and hardship to yourself. Instead, it's about paying attention, using small moments to deliver value, keeping your promises, and empowering the customer. Actively trying to make your customers happy, whether with advice and recommendations, tips to get a better deal, timely reminders to adhere to city regulation, or even a flexible service that meets the customer's needs will make a difference. And, it will keep customers coming back.

The best way to connect and to delight the customer is to give them personal interaction. Whether you are building a service package for this customer from scratch, keeping a customer informed that you are running late, or giving progress updates as you go, customers want to be valued.

Providing adequate training and information to field agents and technicians is crucial for your business environment. Hiring workers who are positive and outgoing and able to create relationships with customers. Instill trustworthiness, reliability, and empathy.

The internet gives most people more opportunity to research and decide what they want than ever before. Sometimes customers will call and ask for exactly what you're offering, and it will perfectly match those needs. Other times, customers need help, and not always because they can't figure out what they want but often because your website, brochure, and offerings don't precisely meet their needs.

Customer centricity is the concept of designing every aspect of your business around the customer. After all, that's what business is about. Even the person driving the truck must keep the customer in mind, because their timeliness, or lack of it, will dramatically impact the customer's experience. But customer centricity also means understanding what customers want and why.

Retaining customers and building customer loyalty may seem expensive, but the Chartered Institute of Marketing suggests it's 4-10 times cheaper to invest in customer loyalty than customer acquisition.1 As we reviewed in the opening chapter of this book, it's also easier to sell to a return customer than a new one. Hopefully you now have a better idea of how to build customer loyalty to reduce churn and build repeat customers. These best practices go over some of our key points.

Loyal customers are hard to come by, but once you've convinced a customer that they can trust you, they will come back again and again. In this book, we've reviewed the various tactics that promote customers to trust you, many of which extend well beyond offering good service and into honesty, integrity, and treating customers like you care. If you can consistently offer personal, empathetic service, connect with your customers in a meaningful way, and solve their problems first and sell later, you will build meaningful relationships that last.