Building Better Relationships with Customers: A Guide

Your customers are your lifeblood. If you can keep all of your existing customers happy, you’ll have a nice group of repeat clients who may well be enough for you to reinvest in growing your business further. And, of course, happy customers also recommend good businesses to their friends and family. They’re one of the key indicators of a company that’s going places. So it’s important to maintain better relationships with customers which is possible when you put customer satisfaction near the top of your own priority list.

Here’s how you can act on it, making your customers happier and more loyal as time goes on. 

Management

Source: mgmu.ac.in

First thing’s first: you need to structure your attempts to make your firm more attractive and appealing to your customers. Without a way of managing your customer communications and interactions and logging how your efforts to improve customer journeys are changing your data points, you’ll just be flailing in the dark. 

That’s why crm software is so important for firms looking to build better relationships with customers: it’s how businesses keep track of their progress.

In your case, progress will largely define by how many individuals you’re turning from dispassionate skeptics to passionate converts to your business and loyal supporters of your brand. Use CRM management tools to understand how your efforts are working. 

Indirect Messaging 

Your business is constantly sending out messaging and branding into the wider internet, and it’s through this content that you’ll also influence how your customers see you in the long term. Let’s say you’re targeting young, urban consumers, and you’re also looking for loyal customers. Perhaps you should make sure your indirect marketing messaging is:

• In the language of the young people, you’re trying to draw the eye of
• Relevant and rewarding for that group – something they may be proud to share with their friends
• Speaks to a wider mission or identity that your core audience and consumer base can get behind

Marketing in this sense can really help underscore to your current customers just how perfect a match you are to their tastes and their values. To manage all of this and to make sure you’re always delivering excellent marketing content, check out this marketing plan template: https://monday.com/templates/template/85832/marketing-plan.

Touch Points

Each time your firm makes contact with a consumer or a customer, it leaves a trace. This trace can be either positive or negative, and the sum of these traces will deliver the ultimate impression these end users are left with your business. The difficult thing is working out all of the touch points your firm has with customers – and which of them you’re able to improve.

Most firms use CRM software to help them picture these steps. But the software can only help you visualize. It’s up to you to find creative solutions when you’re trying to improve certain touch points. But here are a couple of examples of touch point improvements:

• The confirmation email after an order: can you make it more personal, less annoying, and more rewarding for the customer to open?
• The delivery date and time: is it possible to give your customer a choice of when their package is delivered?
• Return visits to your website: could you use cookies in order to know who you can “welcome back” to your web pages on their second visit?

All of these small touchpoints can improve with savvy customer relationship management. 

Also Read: The Most Important Customer Service Skills

Feedback

Source: platinumcopiers.com

Too many companies seem to be disinterested in feedback. This is surprising, seeing as the views of a handful of customers can give you far more insight into the performance of your business than a consultant.

Your customers are full of impressions that they’d be more than happy to share with you – especially if you offer some form of reward, like a voucher or a token, that they can spend with you. Some questions it could be useful to have answered include:

• What’s the best part of interacting with your company?
• And what’s the worst – what really annoyed, bored or upset them?
• Could you do anything better, and is there another company they think is doing better than you?

You are, after all, looking to find ways in which you can operate differently – and more impressively – than competitors in your market. But often, consumers will be more than happy to make these comparisons themselves, seeing as consumer expectations are usually set by best-in-class alternatives. 

Build closer ties with your customers in order to begin building a reliable consumer base and a company that’s responsive and appreciative of the people who spend money with you.