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Your customers are crucial to your business. Without them, how can you expect to make any kind of profit? It’s easy to take your customers for granted, but in the age of the internet, you’ll soon find that if your customers aren’t happy with you, they’ll move onto your nearest rival.
It’s a competitive game, which is why you need to show your customers the same loyalty and admiration that they show you. Improving your relationships will help ensure they keep coming back and could help you develop a community around your business.
Look forward to a healthy future for your business with these tips on how to build better relationships with your customers.
Engage with them
Engaging with your customers is a great way to help build brand loyalty, while also making your business a much friendlier, more approachable company. One simple way of improving your customer engagement is to use your social media channels. Connect with your customers, ask them questions and respond when they write to you. Engaging with customers can be very simple, yet few companies manage this successfully.
By focusing more on your customer engagement, you could benefit from improved sales as well as being able to bring in new customers through positive word of mouth.
Recognize and reward
Do you reward your existing customers? What would make them come back again? Having a loyalty scheme is a great idea for businesses. It helps to retain customers, while also encouraging new ones to sign up. A loyalty scheme could be as simple as collecting points towards a discount and could encourage your customers to shop more. You could also provide exclusive existing customer discounts that they will be more than happy to take advantage of.
Many businesses focus on bringing in new customers but don’t forget that you need to invest time in your existing customers too.
Improve your customer service
Customer service is very important to customers. If there’s a problem, they want it resolved quickly and painlessly, as well as being able to ask questions easily. There are many ways you can improve your customer service, and beginning with staff training is one of them. Meanwhile, a helpdesk ticket system could bring some significant improvements to how you manage your customer service, leading to happier customers overall, and better efficiency for your employees.
Effective customer service is vital to your business, and improvements should be an ongoing part of your forward work plan.
Ask them what they think
Do you ever ask your customers for their opinions? Obtaining customer feedback can help you find out what’s going well, what needs improving and what things you need to stop doing. It can also be a useful way of piloting new ideas and getting feedback before they launch. A follow-up survey after a purchase is one good way of asking for feedback, or you could even host a prize draw as an incentive for more people to give you their time.
Asking customers to review products is also important, as online shopping relies on reviews to help someone make up their mind. Encourage this kind of feedback to help you strengthen your business through positive word of mouth.
Show them that you care about what’s important
Would you consider your business a responsible company? Then make sure you shout about it! Consumers are becoming more aware of social issues, responding positively to businesses that share the same concerns. From making sustainability pledges to trading fairly and ethically, it’s good to be a responsible company and do more for others. You can communicate the work that you do through your social media channels, through media coverage and through your own website and blog as a way to that you’re a responsible business.
Protect them
Customer data is very important, and cybersecurity threats can put that data at risk. It’s your duty as a business to do everything you can to protect your data and keep your customers’ information safe. A data breach can not only lead to a financial penalty, but it could cost you your reputation too. Being seen as a trusted company is important, so don’t let your business get caught out.
Building better relationships with your customers can help to protect your business’s future. While pricing is still high on a customers’ priority list, they also care about ethics and the type of personality they perceive a business as having. Work on improving your customer relationships and watch your business continue to grow.
