Customer Referrals and Loyalty

By Sanya Weathers

When you get a referral – a customer who checks you out because another customer sent him – you have two transactions to complete.

One is to celebrate the new customer. You need to immediately show him why his friend spoke so well of the product. He needs to be connected with information and help, and with the outlet you want him to use to communicate status updates, downtime, and developer news.

–    Connect with help. Customer satisfaction comes from meeting the customer’s needs. If something is unclear, he needs solid and simple documentation. If something is broken, he needs to connect with whoever’s got a fix. Getting to documentation and customer service should be one click simple, and showing your new customer how to get those things is a priority second only to showing him how to dive in and use your product.

–    Connect with your news outlet. How will you communicate downtime and upcoming changes? Figure out what your solution will be (website, Facebook, your patcher, newsletter) and give your customer that information. But don’t just say “here’s the link, it’ll do you good.” Give him an incentive to go there. Tell him there’s a code for a free item, a potion, a badge for his profile, or special access if he’ll just go look at your website/FB page/patcher/newsletter archive. Make sure the destination is so clearly valuable that once he’s there, he’ll want to stay there.

The second transaction is celebrating the customer who did the referral. Everyone knows at this point to offer rewards in exchange for referrals – free time, free product. But you can do more. Referrals are not as frequent as you think. (If they are for you, great, you don’t need my help!) Make it easy as you can – allow real names as well as character names to count as a successful referral. Consider contacting each of your referring customers and ask if they’d be willing to tell you what made them speak out on behalf of your product. Find out what else you can do.

The reason you do this is because satisfaction comes from meeting needs, but loyalty is an emotional connection. Someone who is loyal doesn’t care that another product might be a few cents cheaper, doesn’t worry about graphics, and isn’t affected by the flavor of the month. The kind of customer, in other words, who repays your efforts with guaranteed income and lots of future referrals.