According to a customer service survey by the XM Institute, customers who gave a company a “very good” were almost guaranteed to use their services again. Customer relationships are essential in business. Despite the emphasis on low prices and saving, most people want to be treated as more than a name on a spreadsheet.
Building a good relationship with customers isn’t easy. Learning is the key to making it work. We’ll offer some ideas for building such a relationship in this article.
Get to Know Your Customers
Instead of treating your customers like a potential sale, get to know them as people. Even brief encounters can endear people to your business. This is because of something known as the mere exposure effect. The mere exposure effect states that people prefer familiar things.
Meeting people isn’t enough to earn their loyalty, though. How many people do we run into in a day and think nothing of it? Winning a customer’s heart these days takes more than just brand recognition.
To build customer loyalty, you’ll have to practice what’s known as pathological empathy, which isn’t nearly as creepy as it sounds. It means getting to know your customers and why they buy things so you’ll know how to better serve them in the future.
Be Open to Feedback
Have you ever gone into your favorite restaurant and the waitstaff knows your order? There’s something comforting about knowing that a place you frequent has been listening to you. When you show that you’re open to customer feedback, you let them know that you value their opinion.
You can get customer feedback at every level of a business transaction. You can have a review option on your website, or a suggestion box near the checkout, for example.
Some methods of feedback might require security measures to make sure nobody is giving false advice or trying to hack your computers through the internet or phone. For phone security, it helps to use mobile number verification. These services can use a caller’s phone number to determine if the number is a real one and if it has been used consistently.
Reward Loyalty
One of the best ways to show that you appreciate your clients is to establish a loyalty program. Find something fun or helpful that you can do for the customers who buy from you often.
People have come up with all kinds of interesting ways to recognize their customers, from donating part of a purchase to a charity of the customer’s choice, to learning and celebrating their customers’ birthdays’ with discounts and special offers.
A Guide to Building Customer Relationships
Creating and maintaining good customer relationships will do a lot for your business in the long run. Customers who feel appreciated by a business will not only return to it but might also recommend it to their friends and family.
We’ve discussed how to build such relationships in this article, but there’s always more to learn. You can learn more about business and various other things by looking around our site.
