Your relationships with your clients decide your business’s financial well-being. Studies have proved that a strong customer relationship will retain valuable clients for the long term, increasing revenues. Customer relations are built by providing the best customer experience by solving their pain points and answering their queries whenever they come up with any.
Before you understand the ways to build positive customer relationships, you should know why it is important to build them. Companies compete against each other by developing a better product that solves the pain points of customers, and not to mention, it is the hardest part, but what truly makes a business successful is customer relationships.
In this day and age, customers are not just keen on what you are selling but also how you are selling and how they will benefit from it. The shift in their focus has put added pressure on companies to train their customer support team to be already ready to give a helping hand.
Research has shown customers’ expectations have increased, and since technology is improving the way the business is done, their expectations are going up and up every other year. This is certainly a big challenge for businesses to build strong relationships with customers.
How customer relations are different from customer service
Most of the entrepreneurs do not exactly know the difference between customer relations and customer service. They have a frame of mind that as long as you are providing the best customer service, you are moving forward to maintaining a customer relationship.
They may look very similar, but they are distinct. Customer service aims at solving the problems of customers by answering their queries to ensure customer success. In other words, it focuses on using the best strategy to make the user experience the best.
However, customer relationship is building a bit different from it. It ensures your ability to identify present issues and react to them to improve your future experience. It allows you to be more proactive, which does not just improve customer experience but also helps engage them. Once they are hooked to your product and the way you approach them, they will make repeated purchases, which means you have built a positive relationship with them.
Tips for building customer relationships in a positive way
Here are the tips you should follow if you are looking to build a positive relationship with customers:
- Invest in employee training
The first thing that you need to do is to invest in your employee training. Remember that you cannot build a strong relationship with your customers unless you provide better customer service. If they are not satisfied with the way you solve their queries or they are not happy after using your product, they will never bother to come back to you.
Though you can grab new customers, you can build customer relationships only by retaining old customers. Your customer support team must be highly skilled and talented. They should know how to pitch a customer.
They must be able to identify the customer problem immediately and provide them with the best solution. In fact, they should learn the technique of being proactive. For instance, they should already know what kind of queries users may ask about your recently launched product. After-sale customer experience is also important to retain them.
No user will come back to you to make a complaint. You should contact them and ask if they are satisfied with your product. Make sure you invest in the onboard training of your employees. Use advanced technological tools to understand user behaviour, and if you do not have sufficient money to invest in them, borrow money. If you have already taken on several debts, take out unsecured debt consolidation loans for poor credit and settle them once and for all, and then after paying off the debt consolidation loan, you can take out a new loan to fund your tools.
- Use chatbots
It is not that easy to provide one-to-one service to all of your customers, especially when you are a large company that has to handle an inordinate number of complaints. Ensure you have an opportunity for self-service. Here come chatbots.
They can address the most common questions and guide customers about anything like buying procedures or other basic things. Though some customers will try to phone you, having a chatbot will help solve most commonly asked questions immediately, and that results in fewer number of queries to be handled by you on the call.
- Show appreciation to your loyal customers
You may have some customers who have made repeated purchases, and you should be thankful to them. It is vital to show appreciation to them by running loyalty programmes as this shows that your focus is not just on increasing revenues but increasing brand loyalty.
When you treat your valuable customers in an extraordinary way, they feel delighted and try to repeat purchases even in the future. You can offer them additional discounts or run a scheme of “Buy 2 gets 1′ free’ exclusively for them.
- Provide education programmes to your customers
This is exclusively available for those businesses that are involved in B2B. Providing education programmes is the best way to retain your customers.
For instance, if you sell software to recruitment companies, you can hand out a manual guide on how to shortlist the best candidates in three easy steps or something like that.
The bottom line
Building a positive relationship with your customers is important for business growth, and this will be possible when you start providing the best customer experience. Apart from that, you will have to be proactive. Offer them what they need before they start feeling its need.
Further, you should use chatbots, show appreciation to your loyal customers, provide education programmes to your customers, and invest in onboard training of your employees. Use advanced tools as they will help better understand the behaviour of the customers.
