Businesses know that winning the trust and loyalty of customers is not easy. Businesses compete with each other to get the attention of the customer. Customers are always on the lookout for a better offer, a better deal. To keep the number of defections low, businesses work on building relationships with customers.
Retaining customers always is more profitable for businesses than finding and converting new customers. A business that provides good customer service always wins. Let’s look at the number of ways a business can work on building customer relationships to ensure that his flock of customers stays with him.
1.Know the customer
A business must know all about the customers it is trying to woo. It should know what influences their purchase decision. Marketers must try to understand what their customers are really looking for.
Businesses must invest in good analytical and monitoring tools which provide them the idea about the customers’ journey, their purchase intent and more. They must interact and engage with the customers frequently.
2. Have standard processes
As a business, you must work on having standard processes to deal with customers at every touch point during the customer’s life cycle. You need to make sure that the customer facing team provides superior service without glitches to the customers.
Customer service standards are defined in the measure of timeliness, accuracy and appropriateness. You must therefore ensure that your efforts are directed towards providing the right services on time. You must have the right standard response to the problems customers face.
3. Train your employees
All your customer facing employees must be trained well. It pays to have highly trained teams on the jobs. The issues are solved efficiently and quickly. When best business practices are followed, employees understand their role in a better way.
Plan for adverse situations and emergencies. Practice dealing with them. Employees need to be able to meet all the expectations of the customers.
4. Consistent service across channels
Customers prefer predictability. If your business has presence across different channels, make sure customer service teams responding from all those channels follow a standard consistent format.
If a customer has a complaint, make sure you ask for the details and feed it into a centralized channel from where everyone involved in servicing is able to access it. Customers hate repeating themselves. If every time a customer follows up on a complaint he is asked for details, it reflects poorly on the coordinating and data maintaining capability of the organization. To overcome you can use Zendesk or Kayako which is effortless customer service software that’s used by thousands of businesses who want to support their customers effortlessly. Learn more about Zendesk alternative.
The infographic given below provides the methodology of building customer relationship which is quite useful.
About Author
Samir Motwani is a growth hacker cut from a different cloth than most entrepreneurs. This action oriented technophile may have been trained as a developer, but is a designer at heart. The current CEO for Salesmate, a CRM tool, is adept at developing low-cost strategies for startups, and defining best practices for budding ventures.