Customers are the backbone of every business. Before winning lifetime brand advocates for your products and services, it is important to have an effective strategy that engages new customers first so they return and buy with you again.

The Direct Selling business industry is now at a crossroads where competition is no longer only with fellow direct sales companies but also with solopreneurs and influencers. It is a pivotal time for executives to up their game in maintaining customer relationships to ensure brand loyalty and retention. But how exactly does one create a culture that attracts and retains customers in the field?

On a recent forum with the Direct Selling Executives Forum, NaXum CEO Ben Dixon explores the different principles that make customer loyalty possible.

Awareness of Customer Experience

Beyond the product you are selling, it's the actual experience your customers go through that draws them back to your business. The best way to promote a brand is still through word-of-mouth stories from a customer’s first-hand experience. From the navigation of the website to the placing of orders and communication, awareness of the real customer experience is a top principle business owners must never neglect. If you cannot impress your customers with the buying or subscription process, you risk losing repeat customers along the way.

“More today, companies have to understand where your retail customers are at, what they are doing, and how they are shopping,” Plexus President of Sales and Marketing Travis Garza shares on the forum. Sometimes we do not know what they know and it is only when we ask and take that Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey that we will know the real score and be able to identify the right initiatives for those benchmarks.

Even if your company is not big enough to have people in charge of reviewing customer feedback, all that is required from you is just an hour every week to stop and think about what your customer experience feels like to your newest fan.

Taking Action on Customer Feedback

The answer you are looking for may not necessarily be a robust shopping experience but a simple and seamless one. Regardless, to know what your business exactly needs, invest time to think about what it is like to be a customer.

You might have experts in your team but your professional knowledge will never be as valuable to your business performance as customer feedback. Their insights remain to be the most powerful source you can rely on in making business decisions and developing future strategies. However, collecting the data is only the first step. You also need to learn to translate it into actionable steps that would satisfy your customers.

“How are you gathering this information and are you taking action on what it is telling you?” Ben explains. Your customers are the ones interacting with your business so taking action on their needs will encourage them to stick with your brand and spread a positive word about you to others.

Extreme Ownership on Communication
More than relying on technology for automated communication, another solid strategy for customers to keep doing business with you is to develop a proactive and extended customer service experience.

“First, think of responsibility. The expectations from a representative are getting so much shorter because it’s shifting to the corporate team,” Ben adds on the call. Sending a report to the field is not enough. “Your support team, even when they’re not receiving the call, should be making an outbound call on whose subscription did not go through.”

This kind of extreme ownership of one’s business leaves a mark on customers and gives them more reason to trust your team.

About Ben:

Ben Dixon loves referral marketing. His family found direct sales back in 2006 and had success using technology to create home-based businesses. Since 2010, Ben has focused on serving referral marketing, party plan, and direct sales companies across the globe with the technology they require to empower their passionate fans to virally grow their businesses.

To see episodes from the Direct Selling Executives Forum, visit its Youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxzqiJ6g64-5PAZZ7A0pU6g/featured

About Travis:

Travis has been leading organizational strategies in the global health and wellness industry and using his extensive experience in direct selling to achieve success. In his 20-year career in sales and marketing, Travis has helped multiple businesses achieve new high-revenue targets; two of them reaching nearly one billion dollars in annual revenues.

Travis is an accomplished executive in the direct sales industry. He's held leadership positions at Melaleuca Inc. and Isagenix International. Most recently, he was President & CEO at Kyani International, where he directed numerous initiatives that led to impressive sales growth and operational enhancements in more than 60 countries.