How To Build Long-Term Relationships With Customers
Want to know how to build long-term customer relationships for business success? Check out our detailed guide on how to do just that.
The relationships your brand cultivates with its customers are the most important asset in its toolkit. Good customer relationships will carry your brand through trying economic times, help you build up your customer base in the long term, and ensure you always have a steady stream of revenue flowing into the business bank account.
Short-term customer relationships aren’t enough, especially when you want to secure brand longevity and financial stability. Instead, review how to build long-term customer relationships with target audience members. The right long-term relationships will ensure your business’s success for the foreseeable future.
Track Customer Information and Purchase History
A business should already gather plenty of data on its target audience. Do you track key customer information, like name, purchase history, and more? If not, consider starting ASAP.
The more you know about your customers, the better positioned your brand will be to provide them with excellent experiences and cultivate positive, lasting relationships. At a bare minimum, know the following information about VIP clients and customers:
- Their names
- Their contact information
- Their purchase history or social media messaging history
- Their product or service preferences
For example, if you’ve drawn up a client list of the highest-paying accounts for your brand, review how your salespeople can take care of each client on that docket. Once you know everything there is to know about these key customers, you can provide them with exactly what they need or, even better, anticipate those needs before your customers voice them.
That's at the heart of customer engagement. Tracking customer needs helps build customer loyalty and, therefore, customer retention — both are best friends to a business’s bottom line.
Understand Client Goals and Needs
Learn and understand your client’s unique goals and needs: Every customer your business receives has slightly different requirements, wants, and pain points.
When you understand your client’s goals and needs, you can provide them with personally tailored products, marketing materials, and much more. The more you do this, the more your customers will feel emotionally connected to your brand. After all, you listen to them and provide them with what they need far better than competitors in the same industry!
To keep track of all this information, consider using CRM or customer relationship management software. That’ll help your salespeople keep track of who’s who, plus use newly learned information for upcoming sales pitches and marketing campaigns.
Personalize Customer Interactions
As touched on above,personalization is critical in marketing, sales, and other aspects of your business. Personalize all customer interactions with your key audience members — when possible, of course.
Why? When customers are communicated to personally, they'll start to see your business as more than just another faceless conglomerate or organization looking to take their money. They'll start to see you as a partner, solution provider, and fixer.That’s great if you want to build and maintain long-term relationships with your customers over time.
Personalized customer interactions are better for:
- Boost revenue. When you personalize sales experiences, for example, customers are more likely to make purchases in the first place.
- Improve brand loyalty. When you know your customers’ names and preferences, they won’t be as likely to jump ship for another organization, even if that competing company has slightly better prices. They may even send your brand referrals.
- Increase customer retention rates.Attracting new customers costs five to seven times more than keeping existing customers.
In the long run, personalization proves to your audience members that you know them as people, not just consumers.
Communicate Frequently
It’s also vital to communicate frequently, especially with the most important accounts in your CRM software or on your list. Frequent communication is crucial in any relationship, including personal wants. So it’s no surprise that the same is true for business relationships.
To ensure frequent communication, practice the following strategies:
- Send personalized marketing and discount emails to your loyal audience members.
- Have salespeople reach out to VIP customers from time to time.
- Have customer service agents check in on your customers to make sure they don't have any questions or concerns to be solved.
Communicating frequently and proactively in this way will go a long way toward showing your target audience members that you truly care about their satisfaction and well-being. That, in turn, is key to building long-term relationships with those high-value individuals or client companies.
Honesty Is the Best Policy
While frequent communication is vital, so too is honesty. Customers can very easily determine when a business is inauthentic or trying to hide the truth through a white lie or clever marketing copy.
No relationship can survive with lies as its basis, so seek to tell the truth and be brutally honest about your company and its capabilities, particularly in the earliest stage of a customer's relationship. For instance, when trying to attract new clients to your brand, be honest about what your company can provide.
Those clients will respect you for your honesty. Even if you don’t exactly meet their needs just yet, they might be willing to give your brand a shot at a working relationship just because of the integrity your salespeople display in those initial meetings.
Assign Dedicated Sales or Customer Support Teams
With the highest profile clients and customers for your brand, it might be wise to assign dedicated agents to take care of their needs. For example, sign one salesperson to each major client for a subscription-based company. Assign each big customer a specific customer service agent.
There’s a big benefit to this: human relationship longevity. Simply put, when the same customer speaks to the same salesperson or customer service agent at your company, they attach that employee’s face and mannerisms to your brand overall. It’s essentially humanizing your company, making it easy for the customer to develop a long-term emotional connection with your brand.
In addition, this strategy provides lots of practical benefits for both parties. The same sales agent will know exactly what order for a customer they work with regularly, for example, and the same customer service agent will know how to assuage customer concerns if they've been around a particular issue before.
It’s not only the top-spending accounts that are part of a fully fleshed-out customer-centric marketing strategy. Offer a few paths for problem resolution. It might be chatbot automation or a team of customer experience team members who offer incredible support in real-time.
Ask for Feedback
It’s a no-brainer toask your customers for feedback and implement it accordingly. Your customers can tell you exactly what you can improve about your CX and other operations. In addition, it shows them that youtake their feedback into account and really appreciate their input. That’s an invaluable element in any long-term, positive business relationship.
Prioritize the Customer Experience
Thecustomer experience or CX will often determine whether a prospective customer purchases your brand. Prioritize CX by:
- Doubling down on personalization, as mentioned above
- Focusing on high-quality customer service and solutions
- Empowering your employees to deliver one-of-a-kind, unique experiences to customers
Improving your CX is a comprehensive, multifaceted effort, however. With that in mind, reach out to CX improvement experts like Awesome CX. Our specialists can help you improve your customers’ experiences with our back and front-office BPO services, our teams of highly-trained support members, and more.
Reward Customer Loyalty
Your most loyal customers often provide your company with the steadiest income, as well. Make and maintain those relationships by rewarding your loyal customers in many different ways.
For instance, you can easily reward loyal customers by implementinga loyalty program. Loyalty programs can offer perks, bonuses, discounts, free shipping, and much more for those who repeatedly shop at your store or subscribe to your services.
Rewarding customers for loyalty provides them with practical value, often in terms of savings or extra products. But it also makes those customers less likely to shop elsewhere. When someone joins your loyalty program, they'll want to shop at your brand to earn more points or take advantage of its special perks, even if there's a competing company that has slightly better prices or a slightly more varied product selection.
Get Started Building Customer Relationships With Awesome CX
There are several ways to build long-term customer relationships that help your brand thrive. By offering customers real value and doubling down on positive customer experiences, your business can become known as the go-to choice in its industry or niche.
If you don’t know where to start building exceptional customer relationships, however, Awesome CX can help. As CX specialists, we’re the perfect people to work with to revamp and revitalize customers’ experiences by offering positive emotional moments, guaranteeing good customer service, and much more. Let's chat today and get started.
Sources:
The Importance of Customer Feedback | Small Business Chron
What Is Customer Experience? | Forbes