How to boost your brand loyalty in the office supplies industry
What do you do to improve your brand loyalty?
With so many options for how and where to buy your office supplies nowadays, as well as cost-price competition, the power of online reviews and simply a declining market, it’s becoming harder by the day for office supplies dealers to maintain loyalty to their brand. That’s why we’ve decided to list some of the best ways that could help increase brand loyalty, and even attract some new business too.
MEASURE IT
There is an old management saying that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. When market conditions are challenging, most business consultants will talk about the importance of eliciting maximum value from existing customers, as well as creating new customer relationships. At the heart of this rests your ability to manage and utilise customer loyalty. There are many ways companies measure customer loyalty, including tracking of transactional data, customer satisfaction and customer reviews. However the most reliable metric to measure customer loyalty specifically is Net Promoter Score (NPS). If NPS focus is woven into the management fabric of the company, changes will be focused around driving improvements. The deeper and more extensively this approach is woven into the organisation, the more the customer becomes the focus of all initiatives, and the greater customer loyalty the company enjoys.
CULTIVATE TRUST
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in this industry, it’s that trust is far more important in office supplies than many people think. Whether you’ve known a customer for years and built up a healthy relationship with them, or you’re just starting out with a new client, we’ve found that investing time and energy into building strong foundations pays off. Any relationship takes time to strengthen, so it’s important to keep up to date with your customer information (even the smallest details can prove useful), communicate regularly with your customer base, be open and honest about changes, issues or policies and consistently deliver high quality service.
WORK FROM THE INSIDE OUT
It’s no secret that successful brands are built on solid foundations, and this starts from the inside of your business. Taking time to build trust and loyalty within your business is as important as promoting it externally, and if you have a happy, dedicated team, this will make your overall offering and brand image stronger. It’s also important that management are committed to motivating team members, ensuring employees feel valued and want to be a part of your firm’s success. Team building events, social gatherings and days out can be great for fortifying relations internally, which then positively affect all aspects of your business.
LET YOUR CUSTOMERS DO THE WORK FOR YOU
Unsurprisingly, big brands like Amazon and Apple are excellent at promoting their offering simply through the advocacy of their impressed customers. Creating an exceptional customer experience and offering a service which truly adds value to your customers’ lives is key. Collecting customer reviews will help you gather a better understanding of how your customers feel, what could be improved, identify the segment of customers who are happy enough to promote your brand for you (and encourage them to do so), and work on improving the opinions of those who aren’t.
make it easy for your customers to shop with you
When investing in an e-commerce solution, think about your customers. A good e-commerce solution needs to be a responsive, flexible single system that will help you acquire customers, process orders, control fulfilment, manage finance and service the customer all on a single platform without the need of a costly third-party system integration. This will ensure that you can provide your customers with a seamless multi-channel experience, improving their brand loyalty and retention.
work with reliable partners
At Office Power we partner with ambitious, successful office supplies dealers who strive to have more control and more confidence of their businesses. We provide them with unrivaled technology and support which help them achieve exactly that. Our technology allows our dealer partners to delve deep into their customer data, measure their loyalty, monitor their behaviours as well as provide them with outstanding customer experience. All this allows them not only to address any issues before they arise, but also manage their customers in the most efficient, automated and profitable, data-driven ways, cultivating strong relationships and improving loyalty. Get in touch to find out how this works for our dealer partners and find out whether you’re missing out.
