Recessionary times in economies around the world are giving a tough time to organizations. Making good profits has become a tough task. Achieving profitability has itself become very challenging. In such a scenario, when customers are reluctant to spend without giving a thorough consideration to each and every purchase, competition is bound to become tough. Under immense pressure to maintain their profitability, many organizations falter and take steps that hit their brand equity. There are better ways to manage the crisis. Here is a list of five steps that can help with customer retention.
1. Engage with customers
Social networking platforms allow you to reach your target audience without you having to pester them with telemarketing or sales calls. You need not fill their e-mail inbox with spam. Social media gives you the opportunity to let people know of the value that your brand offers to customers. Attend to their queries. Be prompt to resolve issues faced by people. Never allow any issue to snowball into a major controversy. Use social networking platforms to convey your message and to dispel the negativity as and when it surfaces.
2. Position the products as per client needs
This is essential to build brand loyalty. Only when customers see a product as appropriate in accordance to their needs do they stay loyal to a brand. Pitch a product by projecting it as a solution to the hassles faced by your target customer segment while using other products in the domain.
3. Emphasize on excellence in customer service
It is said time and again that customer service is the differentiating factor when competition is tough. When a brand is facing erosion in its brand equity, the best way for you to resurrect the brand is to lay a renewed emphasis on ensuring quality in customer care so as to make the clients feel valued. This strategy works without fail.
4. Utilize customer feedback
As products are meant for the customers, it is important for you to give significance to their feedback, more so in times of dwindling sales numbers. Introduce a new range of products taking into account customer preference. Work on product enhancement to bring something exclusive to your clients.
5. Never resort to unprofitable competitive pricing
Every brand has a value. Do not erode that value by your own mistakes. Customers are willing to pay for a brand if it offers quality for its price. Brands command a premium on the back of exceptional product and service quality. Some brands carry immense aspirational value. Work towards enhancing the value of your product rather than killing the brand by offering it at prices that are difficult to sustain in order to maintain profitability. In any case, recession will not allow you to turn profitable on the back of high volumes.
Brand equity is built gradually over a period of time but a single incident holds the potential to cause a considerable damage to the work done over the years and can erode the goodwill that a brand enjoys. A PR team is thus indispensable but its success also depends on a well thought out strategy to create a positive aura around a brand. Damage control comes under the same. A proactive approach works best to retain the customers.
