How Are Your Customer Relationships?

You never get a second date with customers if the first goes badly. It’s that one single blind date that makes or breaks your future with a person. Similarly, even if you are in a good solid relationship, it doesn’t take too many bad experiences to call it quits. There is nothing as valuable – nor as fragile – as the relationship with your customers. If you’re currently on rocky ground, let’s make this the year you get it right.

Building a solid partnership brick by brick

Strong relationships don’t happen overnight. And they don’t happen without plenty of effort. This was the basis for Steve Olenski’s “Customer Relationships: Creating A Foundation For Successful Marketing Partnerships” Forbes article, summarized and generalized into themes below.

Make value as the highest priority

First and foremost, provide great service to your customers. This is what will get them in the door and keep them at the party. Once your customers are fully engaged in your brand and product, treat every interaction like your lifetime profitability depends on it. That means every interaction and conversation needs to be positive, proactive, and fully responsive.

To put this into a persuasive context, did you know that 80% of customers are generally willing to pay more to service providers who handle their customer relations better? Putting that into tangible terms, make sure the customer is fulfilled at every touch-point, follow-up in a timely manner on all issues, and demonstrate your appreciation for them in a consistent and visible way.

Put customers first

This may seem self-explanatory, but no one will ever matter more than your customer. In a solid and collaborative relationship, you’ll always have a base level check on how they are doing through regular outreach, customer surveys, and ongoing communication. However, if there is an issue, you need to act fast. You need to first communicate that you fully hear and understand their issue and you are willing to come up with a solution. If it’s an urgent matter that can go haywire (or viral) without immediate assistance, drop everything, and fix it.

Understand your customer

This really connects with the above point. You can’t assume that you know your customer if you aren’t in touch with them. The transaction isn’t the only interaction you need to be concerned with. If your customers have feedback (good or bad), they need to know exactly how to get in touch with you at any point of the day. Make it easy for them to find and use your many communication portals such as email, your website, phone calls, or social media.

Make your customers feel at home

When you welcome a guest into your home, how do you act? Are you hospitable and cater toward them? This is exactly the same approach that you should take with your customers. You first need to get them to trust you. This is easily achievable through steps such as promoting easygoing and responsive customer service, creating an easy-to-use website, and adopting a conversational (as opposed to technical) vibe. Customer testimonials also help validate your credibility.

When in doubt, go the extra mile

Achieving and maintaining an exceptional relationship with your customer is far from one-dimensional. If there is something that you think will make your customer happy and more loyal, even if it’s completely new and out of the box, do it. YOU know your customer better than anyone else out there, so you will not fail if you tap into that unique profile and offer products, services, and customer service that directly speak to your customers.
What steps have you taken to transform your relationship with your customer? We all learn from each other, so please share!

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Reference: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2015/11/18/customer-relationships-creating-a-foundation-for-successful-marketing-partnerships