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Customer relationships are the foundation of many businesses.
Providing customers with a positive experience and exceeding their expectations in small ways will go a long way toward building strong customer relationships.
With customer expectations rising constantly, maintaining the highest standards of your customers and sales support might soon become a priority for your business.
In the eye of a customer, a company’s overall quality largely depends on the quality of its customer service.
Improving customer relations means your company will have higher customer retention rates.
Customers are more likely to stop purchasing a company’s products or services if they have an unsatisfactory customer experience.
Customers will overlook a company’s mistakes when it puts in the effort to create a satisfying customer relations experience.
Being transparent in your attempt to make things right will help with reducing churn.
According to one study, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can improve a company’s profits by 25% to 95%, so there is a financial incentive to build a positive customer relationship.
Therefore, you should invest sufficient time and effort to create a first-class customer experience.
However, combining the right tools has never been easier – especially if you integrate your phone system with a powerful CRM solution.
You can optimize your customer relations strategies by using tactics that make customer satisfaction a priority.
My name is Ryan-Roa, and I’m the vice president of operations at Kennected.
This blog reviews the importance of customer relations and shares 10 methods for developing lasting, profitable relationships with your customers.
What Are Customer Relationships?
Managing customer relationships is a critical element of building a successful business.
Small businesses with strong customer relationships will see repeat business and improved word-of-mouth referrals.
Studies have found that 92% of consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations, while 82% proactively seek their peers’ recommendations.
A good customer relationship is when the customers have a consistent customer experience every time they interact with the business and leave a good impression.
There is mutual regard and understanding between the customers and business, thus extending for a long time.
Why Are Customer Relationships Important To Maintain?
Loyal and regular customers are essential in any business success.
There’s a 60-70% chance of making a sale to a current customer for business, while there’s only a 5-20% chance for new prospects.
The focus has been shifting to customer service and customer relationships.
Some business leaders believe customer service is the last frontier for businesses looking to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Good customer relationships are a critical part of having a successful business.
Good customer relationships often lead to customers staying with your company for a long time, making more purchases, and spending more money as time goes on.
Increasing the lifetime value of each customer by growing solid relationships is a great way to get the highest return on the investment you made to attract each customer.
They’re important because they set the tone for how existing and future customers think about a business and its products.
By focusing on long-term customer relationships, managers and business executives believe they can improve sales and revenue, and continue growing their firms.
Customer Relations vs. Customer Service
They may sound like the same thing, but customer relations refers to the ongoing relationship you build with your customers.
Customer service is mostly in response to specific and individual customer complaints and/or issues that need to be addressed immediately.
Customer relations involve all parts of the business, and it is most closely associated with the customer service department.
This means that the customer service, customer success, customer support, and product development teams must contribute to building and maintaining the customer relationship.
Customer relations involves both inbound and outbound functions – your company reacts to customer requests for assistance, and takes action to improve future customer engagement.
The goal is to build a mutually beneficial relationship that begins before, and exists long after the initial purchase.
How To Build Lasting Customer Relationships
When you adopt the right techniques to build customer relationships, you deliver great experiences, bringing your customers back to you and reducing customer churn.
By delivering expected service, you stop them from switching to other brands.
Customer experience managers worldwide understand the importance of focusing on customer relationship optimization.
But what many miss is that customer experience extends far beyond the sale.
To truly optimize your customer relationships, you must analyze every interaction they have with your brand, and look at how you can do them better.
Let go of the traditional way of building customer relationships. There are many unique and interesting ways to keep customers happy with your brand.
Start with earning their trust to guarantee that you will have people to support your products, long-term.
Respect them, reward them, and communicate with them, so they know that they are well appreciated
You need to invest your time to build and nurture them over a period.
Seventy-nine percent of customers say that they want brands to show that they understand and care about them before buying anything.
Businesses that perceive the importance of building customer relationships develop an emotional connection and retain with them for a long time.
Create A Loyalty Program
Find a way to reward your most loyal customers to show them that they are top-of-mind.
You can develop your loyalty program to show them your appreciation and respect for being loyal to your brand.
If customers are unsatisfied with your services and feel you don’t care about them, they will never become your loyal partners. Remember, satisfaction goes hand in hand with loyalty.
When they feel appreciated and rewarded, you can make them trust your brand even more.
If you maintain a good relationship with customers, they will come back. Don’t try to maximize profits at the expense of customer satisfaction.
On the contrary, building positive and friendly relationships is beneficial.
A well-known rule says that it’s better and cheaper to keep an existing customer than to create a new one. Don’t forget to pamper your clients to thank them for their loyalty.
A Positive Company Kulture Focused on Customer Satisfaction
Using your excellent customer service as a marketing tool attracts customers who value high-quality, attentive service.
Emphasize offerings like a 24/7 customer service line, a responsive app, or loyalty rewards to attract and maintain loyal customers.
It makes business sense to create a more positive work environment.
When customer relations representatives are more productive, they will be more able to quickly resolve customers’ problems, which will improve customer satisfaction rates.
At the same time, customers will be able to tell if a customer relations rep is in a bad mood, which will affect the tone of the customer experience.
Skill Training
Skill sets can vary widely from person to person across an organization.
Therefore, it’s important to invest in regular and continual training to ensure that all employees have consistent knowledge of your company’s policies, procedures, and standards.
This will help create a more consistent customer experience and improve customer relationships.
There’s nothing a customer couldn’t get from Chewy that the world’s largest online retailer doesn’t carry, yet Chewy boasts a loyal and growing customer base.
Likewise, your business can gain a massive edge by pouring its heart into every customer interaction.
Customers value rapid and open communication and a frictionless sales and returns process.
Train your team to engage in active listening, use positive language, and display empathy in all of their customer interactions.
Personalize Customer Interactions
You can take many tactics and steps to improve customer relationships and genuinely offer better, more personalized service.
Emphasize treating your customers as individuals.
You can accomplish this through frequent social media interaction, sending out personalized offers to customers on their birthdays, or sending out “thank you” notes after your agents close a deal.
Positive customer relations can increase customer loyalty, giving customers an intangible incentive to make future purchases.
According to Esteban Kolsky, CEO of thinkJar Research, 55% of consumers will pay more for a guaranteed good experience.
This means that customer loyalty can generate consistent revenue over the life of the customer relationship.
Respond Quickly
If you cannot deal with their issue straight away (or if you don’t have an answer), at least let the customer know that you understand their situation.
You will let them know that they are vital to you by solving customer issues quickly. Be accessible and well-informed.
Use multiple communication channels (live chat, email, phone) and have enough available agents during rush hours.
Make sure that your agents are always well-informed about your products and services and the customer’s communications history.
Emphasize Customer Success
Real-time support is one key attribute of providing a great customer experience. It is a win-win formula for businesses to exceed customer service expectations and create a good impression.
For any business, customer success serves as a crucial focal point. Helping customers get what they need will reward your brand with valuable feedback and loyalty.
And that is all that matters.
Understand The Customer Journey
To have good customer relationships, you first need to evaluate the customer’s actions and thought processes during the buying process.
Having a customer journey map that details each step of the sales funnel and addresses a customer’s thoughts at every stage can help you empathize with the customer.
Be Consistent
One of the most important factors in maintaining customer relationships is consistency. Be consistent in the marketing methods you use and regularly update your site.
Provide customers with the up-to-date information they need when buying products online. Just be consistent in your effort to retain customers in the best possible way.
Organizations that provide an omnichannel experience – meaning they deliver consistent product information, customer service and account information online, in store and on the phone – build better customer relationships and more brand advocates.
Record Everything
Show customers that you care by referencing their customer files and account information during interactions.
Keeping detailed records on customer interactions can allow you to reference previous purchases, efficiently respond to customer service tickets and look for patterns in customer behavior.
By recording information about each interaction you have with your customers, you can quickly reference a customer’s experiences with your brand
Collect Feedback
To truly optimize your customer relationships, you must analyze every interaction they have with your brand, and look at how you can do them better.
You significantly increase customers’ lifetime value, drive customer loyalty, improve retention, and encourage referrals.
Once you collect feedback data, act on the findings by improving upon areas of weakness identified in customer feedback.
Continue collecting customer feedback and tracking the results to ensure that customer satisfaction scores improve.
When you get insights into what your customers expect, it is much easier to communicate with them and deliver on your promise.
What Is A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?
One of the most effective ways to nurture such relationships with the strategies mentioned above is through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software to help manage data and track communications can allow you to provide more engaged service to customers.
By analyzing data from the CRM database and integrating them with other tools, you will get a detailed overview of customer purchase history, buying behavior patterns, and preferences.
Using software to manage administrative tasks allows your team to focus more on authentically connecting with customers.
A CRM is a platform that can ultimately improve your business’s profitability and strengthen its customer relationships.
Our personal favorite, the robust HubSpot CRM, allows users to capture an individual customer’s purchasing history, revenue patterns, online behavior, etc.
Customer Relationships At Kennected
The key to building strong customer relationships, no matter the size of your business, is to engage your customers.
If you want your brand to stand out, give customers reasons to care about you.
That means going beyond CRM and implementing customer relationship optimization tactics that consider the customer journey.
Why not start by experimenting with the tips from this blog? Contact our sales team or schedule a demo today for the ultimate lead generation tool.
The post How Do You Improve Customer Relationships? appeared first on LinkedIn Automation, Messaging & Outreach Tool - Kennected.
source https://kennected.org/improve-customer-relationships/
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