Eight Ways To Improve Your Relationship With Customers

Strengthening your relationship with your customers is a guaranteed way to take your business from strength to strength. After all, it doesn’t matter how wonderful your products and services are if nobody is paying for them. 

With that in mind, here are eight tips that you can use to improve your relationship with customers, old and new! 

1. Work on your customer service skills. 

Providing your team with soft skills training can help improve your customer service across the board. This is because it will improve a variety of skills that help them to better communicate and connect with your customers, whether they are interacting face-to-face or digitally. 

2. Use CRM Software.

CRM (Customer relationship management) software, such as field service CRM, can also come in handy when it comes to improving your relationship with your customers. In fact, that was the very reason they were created! 

For example, they can be used to automate administrative tasks, which means that your customers receive quick answers to their queries while your team can focus on the rest of their workload. They can also be used throughout the sales pipeline as a way to generate proposals or provide cost estimates. In short, they’re a great way to ensure everything within your business works smoothly, both for your employees and your customers. 

3. Gather customer feedback.

Sometimes, improving your relationship with your customers revolves around resolving past mistakes. However, unless you’re dealing with a barrage of negative reviews, you may not be aware that you’re even making these mistakes, even though you are losing out on custom. In order to bring these errors to light, you must ask for feedback from your customers.

Fortunately, there are many different ways to gather customer feedback, this includes: 

• Surveys/Feedback forms 
• Focus groups 
• Follow-up emails 

4. Get to know your customers. 

Getting to know your customers on a more personal level can also help to strengthen your relationship while also encouraging them to think more favorably of your brand as a result. For example, you may want to greet your customers by name in the store or when sending out targeted emails or advertising, which can make the entire sales process feel a lot more personable. 

When clients feel as though a company makes an effort to connect with them, they’re likely to reciprocate this energy through repeat purchases and may even recommend your brand to friends/family.  

5. Reward loyalty.

Customer loyalty schemes can also serve to improve your relationship with your customers, as it means you are both benefiting from your relationship. For example, you may want to offer them substantial discounts on certain products or repeat purchases or give them early access to your latest release. 

While it may take some time to establish a loyalty scheme, it is an incredibly worthwhile endevor, especially when you consider the fact that “over 83% of consumers say belonging to a loyalty program influences their decision to buy again from a brand.” 

6. Use social media to your advantage. 

Social media is a game-changer when it comes to connecting with your customers on a more personal level. This is because interactions via social media, whether they be in the comment section of your latest post or in direct messages, tend to feel a little less formal than other communication channels, such as phone calls or emails.

As such, it’s important that you use your social media to connect with your team instead of viewing it as just another sales or advertising platform. This means that you should be diligent in checking (and responding) to direct messages and comments. You may also want to host live streams or Q&As on your social media, which can drive up engagement and sales! 

7. Respond to positive and negative reviews. 

Responding to reviews, whether they are submitted to your official page or third-party sites, can also strengthen customer relationships. In the case of positive reviews, it shows that the appreciation is coming from both sides and can often incentivize repeat purchases. You can also pull content from these reviews to use in your next advertising campaign, which means they are definitely worth looking over.

Responding to negative reviews, however, is perhaps even more crucial. This is because it enables you to repair a damaged relationship instead of losing the customer entirely. You should aim to respond to negative reviews with both an apology and a solution. For example, if they are upset because a product arrived damaged, you could: 

• Apologize for any inconvenience/upset this has caused
• Provide them with a reason as to why the product was damaged in transit 
• Offer them a full refund, or send them a new, complementary product, depending on the circumstances
• Provide them with contact details to discuss this further (a direct number of email address) 

While it may be tempting to ignore or delete negative reviews, responding to them paints a much better picture of your brand, especially when it comes to taking accountability and showing a genuine interest in your customers. As such, this could even encourage anyone who reads them to make a purchase. 

8. Aim for excellence.

Sometimes, you don’t need to interact with your customers directly in order to improve your relationship with them or their perception of your band. This can also be achieved by simply ensuring you work to the best of your ability day in and day out, meaning that you provide them with exceptional service and exceptional products without fail. 

As customer needs and expectations are constantly changing, it’s important that this, too, is reflected in your business practices. For example, while one product may perform well right now, there’s no guarantee that it will perform well indefinitely, meaning you should also invest in developing new products and services. 

In short, aiming for excellence in your daily practices is sure to put a smile on your customers’ faces, which, in turn, means that you can build and strengthen the relationship you share with them.