How to Make Customers Love You — A Brand Guide

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, shoppers are feeling love in the air — and getting ready to spend big on romantic gestures. The National Retail Federation calculated total Valentine’s Day sales last year at just under $24 billion — $2 billion higher than in 2021. The organization expects this trend to continue upward, making it vital for you as a retailer to optimize your Valentine’s Day customer service strategy by finding ways to make customers love you.

While shoppers seek to spend big on someone they love, brands are in the market to woo customers through relationship-driven support that prioritizes personalization, empathy, and customer experience. With the right support platform and a customer-centric approach, ecommerce brands can achieve both booming Valentine’s Day sales and make their customers love them by creating lasting relationships built on trust.

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Ways to Make Customers Love You

According to our Customer Expectations Report, nearly a third of consumers would “fall in love” with a brand because of great service. With the stress and costs of Valentine’s Day, brands should think even more about how they can earn that love and be there for their customers at a time when they particularly need a helping hand.

Here are three user-centric ways to make customers love you this Valentine’s day (and beyond).

Nothing beats a personal touch

There’s nothing particularly personal (or romantic) about feeling like a ticket at a deli counter. That’s why we believe radical personalization is the way to work your way into a shopper’s heart. The key to that is making customers feel like individuals when they’re shopping. In fact, our Customer Expectations Report showed that 73% of consumers want to be treated like a person, not a case number.

In advance of the shopping season, you can revolutionize your approach to Valentine’s Day customer service by swapping your ticketed system with a conversation-driven approach from Gladly. This comprehensive timelines lets customers feel like you remember them, not just their problem. When your agents are able to recall details from other support conversations, shoppers feel like they’re having a unique experience each time they shop.

Pro tip: Implement ecommerce personalization in a way that makes sense for your brand and your customers. Even the most well-intended brands have blundered in this area, so be sure to learn from their personalization mistakes and proceed with caution.

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Creating deeper, empathetic relationships

Brands shouldn’t stop at small acts of personalization. Building relationships with customers authentically over time should be your main goal — 66% of consumers prefer brands that know them and recommend products they would like.

Deepening the relationship starts in the support center. This is where Gladly and tools like customer details come into play, which help brands build profiles of each shopper. Combined with the conversation timeline, this feature gives powerful autonomy to support agents to reference information about each customer, offer products and services they’d love, and even reach out proactively to them on special occasions like birthdays — or Valentine’s Day. For example, through knowledge of previous shopping habits, you can send a customer an email recommending the perfect gift option with a special holiday promotion.

Pro tip: Not sure how your current customer profile stacks up? Use our free Customer Profile Checklist to identify the types of data you’re currently collecting (or should be collecting), any strengths or weaknesses in your current CRM, and high-level goals for your data collection efforts.

Leave them with a smile

Achieving high customer satisfaction is a sign of a top-tier support center. If you can lessen the stress of Valentine’s Day shopping, customers will remember and connect that feeling to your brand. Consider auditing your existing customer experience to ensure you can reach that level of satisfaction, with tools like our own insight analytics that help identify gaps and opportunities across both channels and teams. The resulting transparency shows you where you should optimize your service and experiences, so every step in the shopping journey builds the kind of customer love that makes great brands so successful.

The bonus to this approach is that great service builds your brand beyond just driving loyalty. According to the Customer Expectations Report, 59% of consumers said they’d recommend brands to their friends and family if they really loved the experience, proving that service is its own kind of marketing tool and eventual revenue stream.

Pro tip: Customer Satisfaction, or CSAT, is a closely-monitored support metric that can tell you if your customer service is helping — or hurting — your customer’s experience with you. Your customer satisfaction action plan should encompass soft skills, hard skills, and technical capabilities.

Gladly Shows How to Make Customers Love You

Flower retailer Farmgirl Flowers is a perfect example of a brand that used Gladly to create empathic customer relationships and happier shoppers. A consistent conversational approach helps the flower retailer’s agents quickly and efficiently respond to customer issues so no shoppers leave unhappy or with the wrong arrangements. By maintaining regularity in the customer experience, Farmgirl Flowers strengthens their brand appeal with shoppers on the merit of its stellar service, and ensures their customers’ Valentine’s Day bouquets make it into the right hands at just the right time.

Whether you’re bolstering your Valentine’s Day customer service or looking to build a long-lasting support center, Gladly can be the perfect partner in finding the most lasting ways to make customers love you.

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