How to increase customer retention and show your customers you truly care about them! Most dealerships forget to reach out to existing customers because they are focused on trying to gain new ones. Here are a few steps of attracting your existing customers and making them feel loyal to your dealership and to the brand so they will come back and do further business with you.
1. Make it personal: When hosting an event and calling your customers to invite them out, refer to them as V.I.P. customers and offer them a free V.I.P. ticket.
2. Label your customers: People are most likely to attend or participate in an event when you refer to them with a positive trait, as mentioned above refer to them as a V.I.P. customer or a very special customer and they will react positively to this.
3. Customers enjoy businesses who know them: Take the time to know and understand your customer, what are their hobbies, what water activities do they enjoy, what lake do they boat on? Once you got some information on what the customer enjoys then you can invite them out to a special event that you know they would like.
4. Have a customer appreciation day: Show your customers you care. Host a customer appreciation day, host an in house party with free food, free drinks, and some kind of discount, either in sales, service, or proshop.
5. A complaint is a gift: Most dealerships look as a complaint as a curse, a dealership thinks once a customer has a complaint that they will never do business with the dealership again. This in fact is not true, most of the dissatisfied customers don't complain because they think that no one is listening. They just walk away and you'll never know why. The reason behind this is because most of the customers don't know how to complain or who to vent to, they also believe that it won't make a difference. While they will not tell you what is bothering them, they will surely tell plenty of their friends. Customers who complain to you directly are good because they are still talking to you and giving you a chance to regain their trust and business and also giving you the opportunity to return them to a state of satisfaction and delight them, and of course the manner in which you respond to the complaint gives you the chance to show what you're made of.
6. Build relationships online: Mostly everyone uses the internet these days, so let's start building a relationship with those customers that prefer to communicate online. Follow up with them on social media, the majority of your clients will have active profiles on at least one of the major social media sites. This gives you a great opportunity to post a picture of your customers on their boat while at a private event or even congratulating a customer on their newly owned boat.
7. Implement customer feedback survey: Listen to your customers. Customer feedback surveys are great because they let you know how your service is performing in relation to your customers and gives you a better understanding on what customers are looking for.
8. Make it easy to reach you: Make it simple for the customer to reach out to you when they need you. Don't make it difficult by forcing them to work or figure out how to get in touch with you. Make it extremely easy to reach you, either by displaying instructions on how to get in touch with the certain department they are looking for, or with a support widget such as an online chat tool.
