Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers. Yes, Seth, we agree that your best customers are far more valuable than your average ones. And you get the best by continuously winning new customers, don’t you?
Think about the process of developing and managing customers’ relationships with your firm – through the Website, a loyalty program, the contact center, at the point of purchase, or in after-sale service. All take continuous attention to detail.
Business is a “people activity” … people like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. Ones with whom they have relationships are at the top of the desirable business option list. The stronger the relationships with your customers, the greater will be their trust and loyalty in your business.
Studies show time, and again, your best and most loyal customers are the aptest to tell their friends about your business, creating strong word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth marketing is the most important element of any marketing campaign.
Making new friends is becoming the most important element of social commerce. Creating positive experiences for building customer relationships often will take some serious thinking. But hopefully not at the expense of the things you can do to build customer relationships.
So there are many important reasons to focus on building strong customer relationships. Here are eight tips to help you forge new, and strengthen existing, relationships:
How to identify customers.
Identify customers
Do this on an individual basis, as you can’t have a relationship with an audience or a population. So before you start relationships, you must target your priority customers.
You don’t have to have each customer’s name and address, but you need to know that the customer on the phone right now is the same one who was in the store yesterday, or on your Web site the day before that.
Acknowledge that I am there
As soon as you possibly can. Don’t make your customers frustrated by making them wait. If you are busy with another customer, inform them you will be with there shortly.
Be friendly
Smile and introduce yourself. Have a nametag and personalize it to help create a meaningful conversation.
Differentiate
All customers are different from each other, regarding both their value to your business and what they need from your business. What a customer needs from you will drive behaviors that you can observe. And behaviors will create (or destroy) value. So pay close attention.
Be knowledgeable
Know all about your products and services. Always assume customers have done their homework and product research. If you don’t know, DON’T BLUFF, but make an offer to do some research. If you don’t have a product or service that can solve their problem, recommend someone else’s product if you can.
Offer free resources, information, and solutions … with no strings attached.
Don’t sell
Use your knowledge and experience to help customers decide. Help them in their search. Pushy sales pitches turn customers off. But personally relevant and interactive conversations switch them on.
Engage
Interact with customers. Almost by definition, a relationship depends on some engagement between the two parties. You want those interactions to be cost-efficient, so drive more and more interactions into more efficient channels. But you also want them to be effective — that is, to tell you something about their needs or value, for instance, that you can’t learn simply by observing. Make customers feel important. Create conversation … seek out common interests by asking effective questions.
Hear and remember the ‘remarkable’ for their next visit. Make sure you understand their question(s). Then answer them as simply as possible.
Help them save time
Time is the customers most valued passion. Help them save it. Avoid seeking other help, or ‘handing them off.’
Be easy to work with
Exceed expectations whenever you can. If your business doesn’t have what the customer wants, offer alternatives, including other businesses.
Be honest
If you don’t know, say so. But use that question to research to be prepared next time. You don’t want to be saying you don’t know often.
Alwaysdo what you say
Do what you say and keep your promises. Not an option.
Follow through promptly
Keep them informed until you can close. Remember time is of the essence.
Tell the truth
Always tell the truth with no hidden agendas and ulterior motives. Marketing puffery is not the truth. Remember consumers are very educated on products and services.
Customize
The “pay off step” for managing a customer relationship comes when your business behaves differently toward each customer. We call this “customization” even though we’re not necessarily talking about it regarding literally customizing the product or service. But whenever I treat Customer A different from Customer B, based on what I think I know about their differences, I am “customizing” the customer’s treatment.
These are not things that we do not already know, of course.
These little things list simply reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten. Then it is up to us to put these lessons of building customer relationships into daily use through persistence and practice.
Remember … all customer-facing employees need to be engaged in customer relationship building.
Does your business focus on relationship building? Do you have any stories to share?
Customers, any adders to this list?
Businesses, do you refresh this list with your staff frequently?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving winning new customers by relationship building. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving the customer growth in your business?
Do you have a lesson about making your growth hacking better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz likes to write about the topics that lead to small business success. He also likes to share his many business experiences. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
