Blog

Customers are the backbone of your business, and how they are treated, remembered, and appreciated are all factors that influence how they view your business relationship. If you only focus on a single aspect of your business, typically it’s the product or service, you’re missing out on repeat customers and organic brand evangelists. According to a Semrush survey, positive word-of-mouth is more effective than paid ads, resulting in five times more sales.

Are you prioritizing customer relationship development in your ongoing business strategy?

Why Deep Customer Relationships Are Important

The preparation and build-up to a sales conversion is a monumental task, and rightfully so, but creating a deep customer relationship will take that initial time investment and multiply it. Customers hate being thought of as a number. A report from Shep Hyken found that 86 percent of customers would switch to a competing brand or company if they found out they provided a better customer experience.

Think about a time in your own life when your experience with a company ended because the relationship wasn’t valued, and you felt taken for granted. Do everything in your power to avoid that same feeling with your customers.

Focus Areas to Develop Customer Relationships

You need to take a step back and evaluate how your business handles all areas of the customer life cycle. Don’t think of this as another go-through-the-motion activity; take this to heart and get to the base of your customer relationship development. According to Bain & Company, acquiring new customers is six to seven times more expensive than retaining current ones.

Personalized Experience 

Talking with a customer opens a wealth of information to work from. You aren’t stalking this person or making things unprofessional; it’s about actively listening and picking up on the subtle details people put into conversation. Make notes in your customer relationship management (CRM) software and refer to it in a future interaction. Learn about a customer to create a genuine personal experience.

Empathy and Understanding 

Get off script and genuinely respond to a concern. If a problem occurs with an order or service call, be authentic and respond in a way you would want a company to show care. A customer needs to feel the person on the other end of the interaction cares and isn’t a robot.

For your employees, caring and believing in what they’re doing will penetrate every interaction and erase any thought of insincerity from a client’s view. Do what needs to be done to elevate customer relationship management.

Continuous Improvement 

You must make it a part of customer relationship development to ask for feedback. The question should be posed everywhere: in confirmation emails, at the end of phone calls, and even with NPS surveys. The idea isn’t to spam your customers but to get feedback you can take and improve the experience for everyone.

Be cautious about how often you ask because you could end up annoying them if they recently gave you feedback. You need to build in a cooling-off period. If a customer leaves feedback, enact a six-month freeze with no requests for feedback. It’s all relative to the business you are in as well; if orders or interactions are less frequent, you might need to change the cadence. You know your customers, so gauge your experiences thus far.

Exceed Expectations 

It’s crucial to understand customer expectations before trying to exceed them. Your customers may have wildly different product and service expectations than you’d assume they would. There needs to be considerable time spent going through interactions, reading emails and customer reviews to fully understand the expectations, and then building to exceed them. The goal isn’t reinventing the wheel but implementing ideas that will unexpectedly delight your customers.

Customer Appreciation 

Never underestimate the value of genuine appreciation. You don’t need to show gratitude with a 15 percent off coupon. You have customers who would love an unsolicited message from the owner or manager telling them how much they appreciate them trusting the company with their business. For example, a customer representative is wrapping up a call, and they take a moment to thank the client for calling in and letting them work through their questions together.

You can’t put a price tag on human moments. Create an environment that celebrates customer relationship development.

Deep Customer Relationships Aren’t a Given; They’re Cultivated 

Price is only a tiny piece of the puzzle in your business. Customer relationship development won’t just happen; it needs to be fostered. By spending time developing a system that works, you ensure the long-term success of your business. You couldn’t be spending your time any wiser than focusing on the client experience.

For over two decades at FirstComm, we have been helping customers nationwide feel that they are more than revenue on the balance sheet. We have built our company with these values at the heart of what we do:

Integrity… in everything we do
Customer Driven…as our clients mean everything
Accountability…to ensure we help you achieve success 

Respect…for our customers, partners, and one another
Excellence…always what we strive for in each endeavor 

Contact us today and let us prove our commitment to the customer experience.