When brainstorming ideas and strategies to boost the length and value of their customer relationships, many firms come up with lots of fancy and expensive ideas of trying to boost their customer retention and loyalty. However, most of the time when they do that all they end up doing is giving their clients expensive gifts, which quite often don’t have a significant impact on how long they keep their customers for.

It’s easy to buy cheap or expensive gifts but it’s much harder to buy and give a meaningful gift – something that shows how well you know your customer and how much you care about them. However, the most meaningful gifts can often be the ones that cost less in money terms but require an investment in time, thought and creativity.

The key to identifying these sort of ‘gifts’ is to think about how your business can be more useful and valuable to your customers. The ultimate is to come up with ideas and strategies that have a marginal cost to your business but a high perceived value to your customer.

Here’s an example of a marginal cost but high perceived value initiative that have helped boost one company’s customer retention and loyalty:

Established in 1983, Howdle Bespoke Furniture Makers make very high-end bespoke furniture. Their business is almost completely referral based and their customers don’t like to be sold or ‘marketed’ to. As a result, the business has struggled in the past to find a way of staying ‘front of mind’ with their customers and, as a result, have often found it difficult to both generate repeat business as well as new referrals.

Here’s an example of one of the things that they have done to build their loyalty and relationships with their clients:

Many installations whether kitchens, beds, bookshelves etc will ‘settle’ and ‘bed-in’ over time meaning that some of their parts will need slight adjustment, tightening or re-aligning at some point.

Understanding this, Howdle came up an idea to offer a free ‘service’ or health-check for the work they had done for all existing and new clients six months after installation.

Once they had come up with the idea, they started to call their clients. Their first call was well received and delivered their first ‘service’ appointment. On arriving at the agreed time, the Howdle team member found that very little adjustment was needed due to the high-quality of their installation work. However, the client was delighted with the new service and promptly scheduled £20,000 of new work!

The lesson from this story is that people often discount the impact that small things, gifts or actions can have on relationships and loyalty. Mother Teresa captured this really well when she said:

“It’s not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.”

Therefore, to better understand what you can do to build increased loyalty with your customers ask yourself the following questions:

• How well do you know your customers?
• What can you provide to them that has limited incremental cost to your business but offers high perceived value to your clients?
• What can you provide them that shows them that you care, that they are important to you and that you want them to stick around?

A version of this piece first appeared in How To Wow (2016).

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay