The The Hofstra University Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University will be opening its new state-of-the-art building in fall 2018. The School’s Department of Marketing and International Business is especially excited. This short YouTube video featuring two department professors shows why. 🙂
Post-purchase communication is a key to continued customer patronage as well as to long-term brand loyalty. Poor follow-up can be quite detrimental to customer relationships. So, how can we do better?
Alexandra Sheehan, writing for Shopify, offers several observations and tips to enhance post-purchase communication:
“Post-purchase communication is an essential facet of any marketing and customer retention strategy. 50% of consumers feel buyer’s remorse after a purchase; so this is your opportunity to help rationalize the purchase and ease their worries. Focusing on and building relationships with your existing customers is a cost-effective way to boost sales. Acquiring new customers costs five times as much as it costs to retain existing customers. A new customer is 5%–20% likely to make a purchase, while existing customers are 60%–70%. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% leads to an increase in profits of at least 25%.”
“Effective post-purchase communications contribute to higher customer retention rates. It keeps the conversation going with your customers after they leave your store, strengthens the relationship with your brand, and helps inspire brand loyalty. From E-mail receipts to customer support, here are some post-purchase communication strategies and examples you can steal for your business.”
Click the image to read Sheehan’s many suggestions for energizing post-purchase communication and building stronger customer relations.
Image Credit: Get Vero
Are companies doing a good job with customer service (the customer experience) — or is it just hype? Some companies are doing well, other not so much.
Forrester recently released the results of its research involving its U.S. 2017 Customer Experience Index. Forrester at looks more than 300 brands in deciding its rankings. In a press release, Forrester noted the following for the 2017 study:
“The combination of growing consumer expectations, rising customer churn rates, and more options with lower barriers to switch is placing a company’s customer experience (CX) center stage. CX leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards, drive higher brand preference, and can charge more for their products. But according to Forrester’s US 2017 Customer Experience Index (CX Indexâ„¢), CX quality worsened between 2016 and 2017: Twice as many brand scores fell as rose, and losses were bigger than gains.“
Here are the leading companies in various industries.
The price competition among wireless phone service providers has certainly benefited consumers. But the extensive marketing of unlimited usage plans — at the same time that prices have been dropping — is impacting on network speed for Verizon and AT&T customers.
Rayna Hollander describes it thusly for Business Insider:
Verizon’s and AT&T’s reactive moves to expand unlimited data plans may be stifling their network speeds, according to T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray. A nosedive in megabits per second (Mbps) for the two companies during Q2 2017, coinciding with the launch of their new unlimited offerings, could suggest that the two networks were strained by the sudden uptick in data consumption.”
“It was only after the first full quarter since offering an unlimited plan that Verizon plummeted to third place, behind AT&T on network speed. Meanwhile, T-Mobile’s network ranks first in download speed and LTE availability in the U.S., Ray said, referring to Ookla data. In Q2 2017, the carrier reached average speeds of 27 Mbps. The success of T-Mobile’s strategy signifies how smaller companies can fly past competitors and swiftly disrupt markets, specifically the U.S. carrier model.”
“As smartphone and tablet adoption in the U.S. approaches saturation, carriers have begun fighting over the same subscriber base. T-Mobile’s disruptive, yet appealing, unlimited offerings have continued to eat into the customer base of rival carriers Verizon and AT&T. In Q1 2017, T-Mobile added 1.1 million customers, and Verizon had a net decline of 307,000 wireless postpaid connections.”
