When we refer to the loyalty We not only focus on customers but also on employees or collaborators. The former are known as external or traditional clients and the seconds are called internal customers for belonging to the organizations for which they work.
Marketing today has had to change to accommodate these types of customers. Today’s executives know that the preservation of both must be appealed to to ensure the growth of their companies.
That is why they need to propose strategies that help them perceive the particularities of each one. Well, on the one hand, external customers became more demanding and informed and demonstrated not to offer loyalty to the majority of brands that they usually consume. In the case of the inmates, they began to worry about themselves, they began to ask for greater participation in companies and to value much more their aspirations, desires and personal needs, as well as their free time, and all this resulted in less loyalty to their workplaces.
It is here where the term Loyalty comes into being: which would come to be the establishment of long-lasting and mutually satisfactory relationships. A loyal customer is not a person who only consumes the same soft drink or clothing brand, he is one who invests a good part of his income in a certain category of consumption or in a special brand, which could be diversified, since we are not speaking of robots that buy the same thing but of people with tastes and needs, and these become more specific as time goes by.
And from this a new point emerges that is very important: full knowledge of the client, that is, we must know what their needs are as well as how they spend their money, if we do not have this information, we will never be able to establish long-term relationships. term. We could achieve this with the inevitable market study, and once we have this valuable information at hand, we can optimize our loyalty strategies to focus on the customers who will be more profitable over time.
But for everything to work in the best way we have to work to achieve the satisfaction of both classes of customers. In the first place, the success of companies is focused on internal well-being, that is, we must start the loyalty process from within the organization in order to obtain stable, satisfied and motivated employees, who are aligned with the objectives of the company and Above all, they are happy to work there, once this is achieved, it will be easier for the executive to train his workforce to perfect actions for the growth of the company.
Later comes the obtaining of the satisfaction of the external clients, and this is related to the marketing campaign that the organization has planned. Within which there are clear concepts such as price, product and service quality, the value that the customer perceives of what he has bought, his personal image or how he sees himself using or consuming a certain product, trust in the company, etc.
Strategies to build customer loyalty
- For example, internal clients must be provided with efficient and timely information and communication systems such as social networks, business management software, investment in training, etc. In this way, they will be able to better participate in the life of the company by demonstrating their knowledge and innovative ideas to improve, among other things, the loyalty of external customers.
- As for external or traditional clients, the well-known discount coupons, accumulation of points, differentiated treatment, creation of special events, be present at the most special moments of clients such as birthdays or Christmas, promotions according to seasons, etc.
- Within marketing, the loyalty of both external and internal customers has become too important a field, since keeping a customer is cheaper than getting a new one, and logically it is more expensive to hire new workers than to keep existing ones .
As a conclusion we could say that the loyalty It is used for a sporadic customer or a new one to become regular customers, we must also take into account the way in which we are going to serve them, which will greatly help to improve their experience with our products and services, and thus their satisfaction will be total.