How to Build Trust in Your Brand and Retain Customers

Many businesses focus their efforts on attracting new customers and spend less of their time, money and attention on retaining their existing customer base. The importance of maintaining positive relationships with existing customers is a crucial element of long term success for businesses.

While attracting new customers is of course extremely important, not placing emphasis on retaining existing customers is an issue that should not be overlooked. In fact, keeping hold of your customers and building up brand loyalty is often a lot less costly than constantly chasing new ones. Advertising budgets and incentives to entice first-time customers in your direction can be eye-wateringly expensive. It is also worth remembering that incentives for new customers can often leave existing customers disgruntled at not being rewarded for their ongoing loyalty to your product or service.

So, how do you ensure that your customers want to stick with your brand for the long term? The answer: Trust.

Building Trust

Trust is, of course, the cornerstone of any relationship, and the relationship between a business and a customer is no exception. To feel motivated to continue using your product or service your customers need to know that your company can be trusted. Trust comes into play on many levels in the relationship between a client and a business.

Ethics

Customers want to be able to trust that your business operates ethically and that your products are responsibly sourced. If companies don’t conduct themselves ethically, the fall out can be huge; you only have to watch a whistleblowing documentary on TV to see evidence of this! The impact on a brand after being exposed demonstrates clearly that ethics and corporate responsibility are hugely important to the general public.

Protect their Details

With rising levels of identity fraud, now more than ever before, customers want to know that the personal data that they provide to you is safe. Customers need assurance that your business does everything possible to protect their information and complies with relevant legislation. For added reassurance, advanced identity verification technology can be used by your business to easily ensure KYC compliance using your mobile device. Implementing a solution like this will give customers added peace of mind and trust in your company.

Excellent Customer Service

With so much focus placed on technology and achieving a robust online presence it’s easy to forget about the importance of customer service.

The customer experience is vitally important, after all without customers you have no business. Taking the time to step back and assess the customer experience offered by your company is likely to provide many benefits. Increased customer retention and an increase in sales are among the positive outcomes that satisfying your customers can bring.
When thinking about the customer experience, it is useful to consider the power of word of mouth from your existing customers, both online through social media and in person. Receiving favourable recommendations and reviews from existing customers may attract new customers, without you forking out for an expensive advertising campaign.