Building Customer Loyalty

5. Entertainment

One route to achieving customer loyalty is to become friends with your customers. When entertaining customers, choose events that reflect your company image and set you apart from your competitors.

5.1 For your most important customers, entertain on a one-to-one basis.

• An occasional lunch or an after-work drink can be fitted into most people's schedules.
• Activities like golf provide a relaxed, non-work environment to get to know people in.
• Find out what your customer's interests are, and indulge them.

5.2 If you need to entertain large numbers of customers, consider having an annual event.

This need not be expensive. For example:

• A specialised travel company might put on a video or slide show each year, plus an exhibition of customers' photos.
• An injection moulding company might combine a presentation on state-of-the-art plastics technology (by a suitably high-profile speaker) with some kind of social networking event afterwards.