Customer Relationships

How can anyone build a solid brand without people? Let’s be honest that’s impossible! Customer relationship is the bond between customers and the brand and their likelihood to stay with the brand. 

The happier the customer the likelier he would stay with the brand.

Ways To Build Customer Relationship:

Businesses must invest in strong customer relationships or they will lose to competitors who are all too eager to poach customers who will leave the brand for few freebies. 

Now let’s look at ways to build customer relationship –

1. Communicate – Talking does wonders. Any relationship is dependent on strong communication. Be transparent and train your staff on effective communication. Rather than just telling customers about your business, have conversations with them. Find out what your customers need, then show them that you have a solution to their problem.
2. Exceed Expectations – Think beyond the box. Always try to offer more to the customers. Everyone loves to get awesome service and if you can make it possible by making sure you exceed customer’s expectations. Keep it simple, under-promise, and over-deliver. When you impress customers, they keep coming back.
3. Ask For Feedback – Opinions matter. A customer feels valued when you ask for their feedback. Collect feedback and implement it within your strategy. Always listen carefully to comments and respond promptly, whether it’s a compliment or a complaint. The worst thing you can do is ask for feedback and not address concerns. Make sure customers opinion counts. 
4. Connect – Ask customers questions, and respond to their inquiries. Ensure you have different ways to connect with customers and keep them informed about your business updates. 
5. Show Appreciation – Offer loyalty or discount programs for long-term customers. Customer relationships flourish if you care extra for your existing customers and make them feel appreciated. Offer your customers benefits that will make them spread the good word about your business.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the principles, practices, and guidelines that an organization follows when interacting with its customers. For any business to function efficiently it requires customer relationships. 

There are various steps that are involved when a prospect joins your company and when they eventually become a customer. It is one of the basic factors while setting up and maintaining customer relationships. 

Customer relationship management software is software that organizes your contact info and manages your customer relationships with current and prospective customers, clients, and other contacts. 

Customer relationship management software makes it simple yet efficient to maintain customer data and also avoid flaws. Isn’t it a simple and effective way to ensure you have a record for all your customer relationships so can offer the best services to your customers. 

Top 5 examples of CRM implementation in organizations

1.  Apple CRM
2. Coca-Cola CRM
3. Amazon CRM
4. Activision CRM
5. Tesco CRM

Best Customer Relationship Management Software here

Customer Service

‘Customer service is the support offered to the customer. This support can be a contact center, chatbot, email, or text services. The prime intention of customer service is to help and support customers with the product or service he has opted for. 

The most successful companies use the best customer service practice to maintain customer relationships. This can be both before and after they buy and use your products or services that help them have an easy and enjoyable experience with you.

Customer experience

This is nothing but the way how your customer feels. It can be after using your product or with overall services that have been offered to the customer. Customer experience is what customers feel while getting associated with your brand. 

There are various factors that affect the customer experience such as how a store is laid out, the level of service they receive, and how easy it is to find products. 

A key point to remember customer experience is referred to the overall journey of the customer from start to end with your brand and will, in turn, help you to maintain a healthy customer relationship.

Customer Loyalty

When a customer is happy with a product he is happy to stay with the brand. Customers long term association with the brand is called customer loyalty. These are mostly satisfied customers and are looking to be with your services for future. 

Customer relationship also depends on loyalty benefits that a company offers. Whether you currently have a loyalty program that encourages your customers to return and conduct more business with you or if you don’t have one in place yet at all. 

For maintaining customer relationships a business should have customer loyalty or reward programs that encourage them to stay.

Customer Retention

The ability to retain your existing customer is called customer retention. Customer retention is impacted by how many new customers are acquired, and how many existing customers churn — by cancelling their existing service, not returning to buy, or closing a service. To maintain customer relationships it is important to know what is customers’ perception of your brand and how you can keep the existing customer and still add new ones.

Customer Feedback

‘Customer Feedback’ is the opinion of the customer. Currently, everything customer wants to invest he looks for feedback or review for it. Big things come with constant change and hence customer feedbacks are really critical when it comes to maintaining customer relationships. The way how your customer feels for your brand is the way how he expresses it. Customer feedbacks are popularly assessed these days through the Net Promoter Score (NPS) value of the brand.

Customer Satisfaction

How happy is your customer? Is this something to be concerned about? The answer to this will be “YES”. Good customer relationships don’t happen overnight, they are earned through the customers’ smiles. The happier and satisfied customers, the likeability of your brand goes higher. Customer satisfaction plays a very critical part in the success of any business. In order to retain or acquire more business, you need to ensure customer satisfaction should be your making it up on your priority list.

Customer Journey Map

Customer Journey Map helps us to understand the overall customer experience. It helps in understanding your customer behavior, likelihood, and recommendations while they are associated with your brand. The customer journey map is a tool to visualize the experience of interacting with your brand from the customer’s point of view.

NPS

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the customer’s likelihood to promote your business to others. NPS mainly consists of customer experience, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. 

The Net Promoter Score survey consists of a two-part questionnaire. The first customer will be asked to rate your business, product, or service on a scale of 0 to 10. The second question is an open-ended question as to why the specific score was given which is counted as customer service feedback. 

Customer ratings are rated as follows – 

Promoters: Customers who rate 9 or 10 and are happy with your services.
Passives: Customers who rate 7 or 8 and have average experience with your company.
Detractor: Customers who rate below 6 and are not happy with your products or services.

You can find to 5 NPS software tools here

Conclusion

In order to ensure you have a flawless customer relationship base include the above points. Key points to remember – customer satisfaction, feedback, and maintaining a good customer journey map to maintain healthy customer relationships.