Your reputation is the first thing to take a hit when any customer suffers a bad experience. You can go out of business with a bad word of mouth. Creating a loyal customer base is crucial for establishing a sustainable business—here are some practical recommendations on how to create and sustain customer loyalty.

Price is Important, But Don’t Overestimate It

Are you competing on price? Here is a secret you must know: customers don’t go anywhere else only to save a buck. What it takes for them to purchase is a superior, fabulous, and outrageously excellent customer service. They either spend enough time online or drive more than 10 miles to get the right combination of customer service, quality, and price. So, just stop trying to compete on price only and provide value.

Make Each Customer a Referral Source

Uber scales millions of trips in 76 countries and 450 worldwide cities using Zendesk—a cloud-based software providing customer support, smart self -service, live chat and messaging, and another feature of a call-to-talk between riders and drivers. That’s why customers happily keep coming back to Uber. No doubt, the company is at the top of a business game in the transportation industry. It is getting five-star reviews from satisfied customers by delivering excellent customer experiences.

Conclusively, the most interesting takeaway from this success story is that clearly communicating with customers on a powerful engagement platform is enough to increase customer confidence.

Think Outside the Box: Innovation Is Your Friend

Learn from another featured story of Dentacoin Foundation. By providing its own industry-specific cryptocurrency, mobile app, opinion polls, customer feedback platform, Dentacoin helps dentists keep winning. Users are rewarded with Dentacoin tokens in exchange for completing a three-month oral hygiene program at Dentacare Mobile App, for filling the healthcare surveys at DentaVox, and for providing honest opinions at the Decentralized Trusted Review Platform. Later on, dentists can use all results and feedback to improve their services and thus achieve a higher level of patient satisfaction. Customers feel heard and benefited at the same time either by converting these tokens into other currencies for value multiplication or alternatively by spending them for future dental treatments at Dentacoin’s global partner clinics. As a result, Dentacoin partners’ patient retention and referral rates surged in the recent months as per a report from a London-based dental practice.

Listen and Be Responsive

Pearson—one of the largest global publishing companies gives its customers an unexpected surprise. Instead of spending most of its time on tracking customers, the company converts every customer call, chat, email, and feedback into tickets in Freshdesk, which is used as an automated helpdesk solution to provide time-savings and customer support.

Full attention is paid to help customers feel confident about their buying decision or feedback. Therefore, with every interaction, the customer feels truly special like it’s their birthday. By using this program, Pearson exceeds customer expectations, reducing the chance that the customers will go somewhere else.

To conclude: provide something shareable, noteworthy, and unexpected. You can spark lasting memories. Don’t forget to harness the power of word of mouth. 92 percent of cyber shoppers read online reviews. So offer premium quality and exceptional service. Reject conventional approaches for a more daring strategy. Keep your promises. Engage customers with your business. Thank them.