7 Ways To Build Better Customer Relationships
No brand survives for long without long-term customer relationships. It’s no stretch to say that customer relationships are the most important factor for the survival and profitability of your business, particularly in a modern, hypercompetitive market where customer loyalty is no longer a given.
Fortunately, you can leverage many strategies and techniques for building customer relationships. Let’s take a closer look.
How To Build Strong Customer Relationships
Good news! There are lots of ways to build better customer relationships, especially with the assistance of partners like Awesome CX.
1. Determine Target Audience Values
Begin by determining your target audience members' values, wants, and needs.Every brand should have a target audience: a group of prospective customers and clients identified via demographic information like age, sex, interests, and so on.
The better you understand your target audience, the better you’ll be able to:
- Create marketing materials, like advertisements and email marketing messages, that focus on making an emotional connection. Resonating materials are more likely to get people to check out your shop and make a purchase.
- Make products or design services that answer audience pain points and that seem more attractive to target customers.
- Adjust or tailor the brand to better meet customers’ expectations or values.
These steps will make your business a much more attractive prospect than competing organizations, like other businesses in the same niche. That's especially important if you’re competing for a limited customer group in a very small niche or business arena.
2. Show That Your Brand Cares
To build strong customer relationships, you must prove to your target clients that you care about their well-being and satisfaction. Many customers have been burned too many times by large corporations or conglomerates that treat them like numbers, not people.
Your brand can do better. Showing your customers that you care will cultivate a loyal customer base and convince people on the fence to give your brand a shot when they might not otherwise.
One of the best ways to showcase care to your target audience members is to provide a top-notch customer experience when things go bad. Sooner or later, someone will make a mistake, or a customer will have a complaint or issue you need to resolve ASAP.
You build stronger relationships when you:
- Listen carefully to customer complaints
- Offer quick, effective solutions
- Stay calm and pleasant
That’s easier said than done for many brands, particularly small businesses without large employee bases. Rely on Awesome CX’s back-office support to help make sure your clients get what they need in a speedy and compassionate manner. Our knowledgeable, experienced CS agents can help you deliver phenomenal customer support to disgruntled patrons time and again. In many cases, good customer support may turn a negative interaction into a positive one.
Other ways to show that your brand cares include:
- Always deliver personalized experiences (see more below)
- Prioritize human interactions with shoppers instead of chatbots
- Take people at their word on the matter of returns or broken products
3. Deliver Personalized Experiences
Clients and customers want to be marketed to as people, not nameless data points.
Luckily, many marketing tools now enable you to offer personalized experiences to your target customers in a variety of ways, like:
- Use an email marketing platform to send personalized emails, complete with clients’ names. These can celebrate the client’s birthday (with a coupon code) or similar.
- Use CRM and other software platforms to provide personalized recommendations, deals, or discounts to your target consumers.
- Assign a dedicated salesperson to high-value clients or accounts. This will allow you to solve any problems they encounter more quickly, and that account/account holder will feel listened to more personally.
Personalized experiences tie into making your clients feel cared for. That's vital when growing and maintaining long-term, positive, and profitable relationships.
4. Ask for Customer Feedback, Then Incorporate It
Every brand has room to improve, no matter the industry or niche. Therefore, it’s a good idea to ask your customers for feedback, then incorporate any feedback they offer (when appropriate). Doing so could have a huge, positive impact on your customer relationships.
Why? Feedback is the easiest way to determine where your brand is falling short of client expectations. When people, for example, say that your website loads too slowly or the checkout process is far too clunky and unintuitive, listen to them! They might indeed know much better than you since they interact with those processes and systems every day.
Ask for feedback by:
- Handing out surveys to customers who complete a purchase.
- Asking customers for their feedback via email after completing a purchase. Follow up with them if they had questions or complaints.
- Offering a feedback form to all customers or site visitors right on your website. This could be excellent for getting feedback from those who check out your shop but don’t end up making a purchase.
Use customer interactions and feedback to identify customer expectations. Over time, you’ll build lasting relationships with these eCommerce clients by practicing active listening and understanding the pain points customers face.
5. Reward Loyal Customers/Subscribers
Reward your best customers for their time and attention. If you haven’t already, consider starting up a loyalty program for repeat shoppers or those who spend a lot of money at your business. These are the partnerships that will generate more revenue in the long term. Returning customers spend 67% more than new ones, so customer retention rates are of critical importance.
Brand loyalty programs can be excellent tools for driving customer loyalty and building up emotionally satisfying relationships for your most important accounts. Of course, the specifics or shape of your loyalty program can depend on your industry and what you have to offer, like:
- Free shipping, especially on orders of a certain value or more
- Special discounts and deals
- Member-only privileges or perks, like access to dedicated forums or exclusive webinars
Regardless of what your loyalty program includes, it should make the most important customers feel like valued members of a community. That's huge if you want to maintain strong customer relationships with those high-value clients.
6. Double Down on Customer Experience
Customer support is vital to any brand's survival and success. It's easy to imagine why. Eventually, at least some customers will have issues or complaints that your team will need to address. If your customer support team knows how to solve those complaints promptly, those negative experiences could be transformed into positive ones.
For example, say that a customer never received an online order they placed a month ago. They’re disgruntled and understandably upset. If the customer experience agent immediately fulfills the order and does whatever they can to solve the issue, they might not abandon your brand at all. They may walk away feeling like you listened to them and that they should stick with your business through thick and thin.
7. Prioritize a Smooth CX for Each Customer
In addition to the above tips, remember to prioritize making and maintaining a smooth customer experience for each site visitor or client. A smooth CX can include:
- A streamlined and navigable website that loads quickly
- An easy-to-understand customer support process if the customer has questions
- A personalized, targeted marketing campaign that makes prospects feel seen and heard, all before interacting with your brand for the first time
Awesome CX Helps You Connect With Customers
Ultimately, these seven strategies should help you acquire new customers and keep clients in the long term. Those people represent consistent sources of income for your business, helping you grow and stay stable, even through periods of economic upheaval.
Of course, actually enacting these strategies can be difficult if you don't know where to start. That's where Awesome CX comes in. Our knowledgeable specialists can help you by offering support services, CX insights and advice, and much more. Send us a note, and let us take some of the stress off your team!
Sources:
How to Manage Customer Relationships | Business News Daily