Month: January 2020

Every brand is hungry to create brand loyalty among its customers. Not surprisingly, this is easier said than done. Just think about how many brands, businesses, and products you interact with every day. There’s probably only a handful that came to mind when narrowing down your favorites. With so much competition in just about every industry, how can brands stand out and cut through the noise? Let’s explore why brand loyalty matters and how you can earn it. 

Brand Loyalty: Why It Matters

Many businesses fail to realize the importance of creating valuable customer experiences until its too late. Leaders at large companies struggle to manage their time between all of the different areas of their business, from HR to finance to product development. However, companies can’t exist without customers. The only way to create brand loyalty is by pouring into your customers and making their feedback a top priority. 

Examples of Incredible Brand Loyalty

When we talk about brand loyalty, a few companies come to mind that pioneered not only the world of branding but customer experience as a whole. How did they create such a cult following within their brands?

Trader Joe’s

In the United States, we’re lucky enough to have a plethora of grocery options available in most of the country. No grocery store chain has been more iconic than Trader Joe’s when it comes to branding and customer service. A dedication to customer service and their focus on creating their own Trader Joe’s-branded products helps them stand out from the crowd. Not to mention an impressive Instagram following and the coveted Hawaiin t-shirts employees wear. 

Goop

While Goop, the lifestyle brand brainchild of Gwyneth Paltrow, has been a controversial brand from the start, there’s no doubt that they’ve reached the gold standard of brand loyalty. By covering taboo topics and going deep into the growing world of self-care, Goop has garnered a loyal following over its lifetime. By introducing its own product line in addition to compelling content, rest assured that Goop and its fans aren’t going anywhere soon.

Zappos

Zappos has literally built its brand on providing outstanding customer service. CEO Tony Hsieh has made customer service his mission, once saying that “Zappos is a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes.” It’s that customer-centric mentality that has made Zappos a favorite for shoe lovers and a company to admire for startups looking to break into a competitive industry.

How to Earn Brand Loyalty

So how can up and coming brands earn brand loyalty? The list is endless – but here are the top 3 things you can do. 

Have a UVP

Brands are fighting for attention in a world filled with media noise. If you want to have staying power in whatever market you’re in, you need to be different. Establish what makes you unique and be clear in your marketing and publicity about what your unique value proposition is. 

Be Creative

Once you’ve established your UVP, you have to be creative in getting your products and services to the public. No brand ever made it far by doing what everybody else is doing. Invest in your team and hire creative employees to iterate on different ways of making your brand visible to the world. 

Listen to Your Customers

And finally, the most important thing you can do to garner brand loyalty among your customers is to listen to them. It doesn’t matter how creative or unique your product, service, or branding is if it isn’t appealing to your target audience. Everything from product development to your social media posts should be in direct correlation with your ideal customer. Knowing how to solve their problems – and better yet, being able to solve them before they’ve given up on your brand – is key to attracting and retaining customers. 

No matter what industry you’re in, Mentor is here to help you create amazing customer experiences. Reach out to us today and see how Mentor can help you establish strong brand loyalty by listening to your customers’ needs. 

Customer retention is a top priority for every business. At the end of the day, no business can survive without loyal customers. So what is the key to creating a brand built on customer retention? Making your customers feel seen and heard plays a huge role in building a loyal customer base – and this is the foundation that Mentor is built upon. ClickZ reports that when done right, “peer-to-peer communication can be used to assess customer health and sentiment.” This is exactly what Mentor does for businesses. 

Here are 5 reasons why Mentor is the best customer retention and feedback platform for your business.

1 – Mentor has advanced sentiment analysis capabilities.

Mentor is an incident-based platform that enables you to pinpoint specific customer feedback and experiences. Our technology analyzes sentiment and customer emotion to break down customer complaints so you can manage them individually. Classic customer experience systems like the Net Promoter Score® are – while beneficial in many ways – often one-dimensional. Our sentiment analysis capabilities allow you to go deeper and have a more personalized connection with customers.

Mentor’s advanced sentiment analysis technology searches for keywords and evaluates consumer sentiment and categorizes it as positive, negative, or neutral. Tickets are created and prioritized based on the magnitude of the issue, enabling your customer success team to take action when needed. Your reps can directly interact with customers if need be, either through email, SMS, or a phone call. 

2 – Mentor is easy to use for customers and businesses alike.

Consumers are used to seeing QR codes, and the general population is familiar with how to use them. A recent study by Statistia found that in the US alone, an estimated 11 million households will scan a QR Code in 2020. That’s no small number – and one of the main reasons we chose to use QR codes as the best mechanism for brands and consumers to interact through Mentor. 

As customers are interacting with your business, whether it’s online or at a brick-and-mortar location, leaving customer feedback through the Mentor platform is as simple as having a smartphone. Customers can hold their phone up to your company’s QR code to leave feedback. They’re then taken to your store’s custom Mentor page, where they can leave responses in a variety of ways – including open text forms, photo and video uploads, and ratings. Once they hit submit, their work is done – and it can all be done in under a minute. 

3 – Mentor allows for one-to-one customer interactions.

Once your customer leaves feedback through the Mentor platform, the software does the heavy lifting of analyzing sentiment, creating and prioritizing tickets, and evaluating the nature of the response. Your customer success team can easily manage the ticket cue and decide on what the next steps will be. Your reps can follow up with customers directly, either through SMS, email, or a phone call in order to solve immediate issues right away. 

This is one of Mentor’s prime benefits – breaking the barrier between businesses and consumers to create a one-to-one conversation. It’s no secret that personalization is one of the keys to customer retention. Every customer deserves to be treated like they are the most important customer you have. Mentor opens up an opportunity for your business to directly interact with customers through these personalized interactions – and it’s those interactions that make all the difference in a customer’s perception of you.

4 – Mentor lets you evaluate customer experiences across locations.

Do you operate stores or businesses across multiple locations? Do you struggle to evaluate the successes and struggles of those stores individually? Mentor is here to help. Through the platform, you have access to unparalleled insight into the customer experience not only by incident, but by location. This enables you to take the appropriate action to correct situations at individual locations before it’s too late.

Mentor also gives you the ability to proactively track incidents within the customer experience team and push tasks to affected locations – opening the door to understanding the customer like never before. Consistency across locations is a huge aspect of customer retention, and Mentor allows for the consistency you need for customer happiness across state lines.

5 – Mentor enables positive ROI for your business.

A solid customer retention rate is essential to positive returns on your investments. Consider how much it costs to not only acquire a customer, along with how much your average customer spends on your business per year. When customers are dissatisfied, you’ve essentially lost their business. Plus, if they go to social media or a review platform like Yelp, they can leave negative reviews and deter other customers from buying from you. 

With Mentor, you’ll have access to in-depth data about your customer feedback and be able to make informed decisions based on specific incidents and locations alike. By knowing your average revenue per customer per yet, you can get an idea of how much cash you’re losing every time you have a dissatisfied customer who couldn’t be helped before it was too late. Mentor enables customer retention, which in turn, enables positive ROI – which is the common denominator of every business.
If you’re struggling with customer retention and are looking for a solution to keep your customers happy and coming back, contact us today to learn more about Mentor can help.

At some point or another, we all have had steller (and not-so-stellar) customer experiences. As consumers, we tend to forget the standard, mediocre day-to-day customer service experiences. However, most of us remember the ones that made a difference for us, whether it was positive or negative. Here at Mentor, our mission is to help empower both brands and consumers by turning as many negative customer experiences as we can into positive ones. When customer experience is done right, it’s a win-win for everyone. Here are the 3 key principles brands should follow to create an excellent customer experience every time. 

1 – Make the customer feel seen and heard.

You know that phrase, the customer is always right? In most cases, it’s true. As frustrating as it is to have a high maintenance customer, you never know the power of an unhappy customer until it’s too late. Unhappy customers often go to social media, Yelp, or their friends and family to talk negatively about a poor customer experience they had with a business. Unfortunately for brands, those reviews are powerful. A report from Nielsen found that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising. Brands need to find a way to turn negative customer experiences into positive ones before customers jump ship.

Luckily, Mentor was built to help brands do this very thing. With Mentor, all a customer has to do when a problem arises is scan a QR code displayed in-store to leave their feedback. Then, the Mentor platform does the heavy lifting of qualifying and prioritizing feedback. Your customer success team can then follow up with customers directly or contact a store manager to address issues immediately. This process not only gives your business an opportunity to fix a customer issue – but to turn this experience into something positive. Brand loyalists are made through personalized, positive interactions between brands and consumers. 

2 – Respond to customer concerns directly and quickly.

In the world of Amazon Prime and same-day delivery, instant gratification is basically a requirement among consumers today. The sooner you can react to a customer request, the better. Mentor’s AI-powered and patented technology analyzes customer sentiment by qualifying responses as positive, negative, or neutral. Tickets are then created and prioritized so your customer success team can make swift decisions on whether they need to contact a customer directly.

Direct customer communication is one of the reasons Mentor is working for businesses. You can follow up to customer concerns directly via SMS, email, or a phone call, allowing for a direct touchpoint between brand and buyer. Chatbots and automated phonecalls may work in the short term, but they don’t compare to the one-on-one interaction that comes when there’s a human to human connection. Modern Litho stated that “The brands who are most successful at engaging new customers and keeping them engaged are talking and acting like a human being.” Mentor gives your customers – and your brand – a voice and allows for an authentic customer experience to take place.

3 – Remain consistent across locations.

There’s a reason why Chick-fil-A – despite being closed on Sundays and sacrificing about $1 billion yearly as a result – is ranked as the number one fast-food chain in America. They’re the masterminds of building an unparalleled customer experience across all of their locations. A simple “My Pleasure” goes a long way when it becomes a brand staple that customers can depend on hearing at every Chick-fil-A across America.

This type of brand consistency begins from a company’s leadership team, but it becomes standard when a company has the means to keep it a top priority. With a customer experience solution like Mentor, you can collect, track, and analyze feedback from multiple locations to ensure brand consistency at all times. Whether you need incident-based statistics or overarching data, Mentor lets you measure it all. A brand that people can depend on is a brand that consumers will return to and become engaged fans for years to come. 

Creating amazing customer experiences is a powerful way to engage your customers and bring them into your business model in deeper and more meaningful ways. If you’re looking to expand your customer experience potential, reach out to us today and see how Mentor can bring your customer experiences to the next level.