Imagine there are few businesses that grow over time, while others have huge swings and eventually descend. What is the difference? The polarity lies in how they focus on building customer relationships.

Strong customer relationships are much like any other relationship. You need to invest your time to build and nurture them over time. 79% of customers say that they want brands to show that they understand and care about them before they buy anything. Businesses that perceive the importance of building customer relationships develop an emotional connection with them and retain them for a long time.

The below model is one approach to building good customer relationships.

What Is Customer Relationship?

A company’s or organization’s relationships with its clients or customers are referred to as its customer relationships. It is an essential component of any business strategy since it emphasizes creating and sustaining a strong, enduring relationship with customers. Enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention is the ultimate goal of customer relationship management because these factors can result in higher profitability and long-term corporate success.

Let’s use the world’s largest sportswear company, “ADIDAS,” as an example to better explain what the term “customer relationship” means.

Adidas is a great example of solid customer relationship management because it knows its consumers, gives them outstanding service, communicates well, offers personalization, acts on customer input, implements reward programs, and keeps its brand consistent. Adidas is considered the world’s most counterfeited brand, meaning that numerous companies all over the world use their trademark. They are practitioners of modern marketing techniques. In 2020, they launched “Prime Green” & “Prime Green,” which were made of ocean plastic, with the aim of ending plastic waste. This sort of advertising not only helps companies maintain relationships with their target audience but also encourages other industries to implement sustainable solutions.

What Are The Principles Of Good Customer Relationships? 

A good customer relationship is when the customers have a consistent customer experience every time they interact with the business, which leaves them with a good impression. There is mutual regard and understanding between the customers and business, which extends over a long period of time.

The actions for building strong customer relationships embody providing real time support and also proactively offering solutions that are geared towards customer success. Customer relations aim to create a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer that extends beyond the initial purchase.

In order to build good customer relationship you need to:

• Customize your approach with warm greetings depending on the scenario.
• Make your customers feel that you understand what they want.
• Know that some customers are more interested in the ways you build customer relationships than your products or services.
• Keep your customers informed about the things about which they are interested in doing business with you.

Your business will need quality support tools at its disposal to deliver great experiences, which in turn can help form good customer relationships. You can sign up with REVE Chat to take the first step towards building good customer relationships. 

What Is The Importance Of Building Customer Relationships?

Building strong customer relationships offers numerous advantages, such as increased potential leads and improved customer retention rates. This article highlights the top three benefits of cultivating exceptional customer relations.

Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The longer the customer stays with your business, the greater is the value provided during their lifetime relationship. High CLV means each customer will bring in more revenue for your company. When it comes to customer success, you should spare no efforts in building strong customer relationships 

Reduced Customer Churn

61% of customers stop buying from a company if they have a poor customer experience. When you adopt the right techniques or even tools and software to build customer relationships, you deliver great experiences, which bring your customers back to you and reduce the chances of customer churn. By delivering the expected service, you stop them from switching to other brands.

Improved Customer Loyalty

Maintaining strong customer relationships is crucial, as acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one. The level of customer service you provide directly influences customer loyalty. You can effectively enhance customer satisfaction by meeting their demands for exceptional service. Happy customers are more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth recommendations about your brand.

 10 Ways To Build Long-Standing Customer Relationship

Building trustworthy customer relationships requires considering all the interactions across the customer journey and other factors that can influence a customer relationship. Businesses should focus on a comprehensive approach to customer success while planning techniques to build customer relationships. 

In order to do the same, here are 10 key factors that any business should consider for their customer relationship strategies.

1.Spare No Effort To Exceed Customer Service Expectations

Building long lasting customer relationships is a smart move from a marketing standpoint. It also helps you anticipate your customers needs, perform ongoing adjustment actions to improve your business, and exceed their expectations.

InContact study found that consumers were generally positive with proactive service. Real time support is one key attribute of providing a great customer experience. It is a win-win formula for businesses to exceed customer service expectations and create a good impression. 

Here are some of the best  practices to exceed your customers expectations:

• Deliver real time support – You can deliver real time sales and support assistance to your customers with live chat. You can gain insights and understanding of the customer journey and deliver proactive support to enhance the customer experience.
• Connect with your customers – Allow your support team to connect with your customers and understand their needs and feedback. Empower them to fulfill their needs and deliver a great experience.
• Make your customers feel special – Go an extra mile to deliver the meet and exceed your customer expectations. Send a thank
• you note to your customers. It will have a positive impact on your brand reputation and increase customer loyalty

Ritz Carlton Florida sets a great example of creating a memorable customer service experience. One of the family members left their son’s beloved toy Giraffe at the hotel during their vacation, and all his father  (Chris Hurn) could do was email Ritz explaining the situation.

The hotel staff responded by not only sending the beloved toy home but also by creating a photo booklet showing everything Joshie had done during his extra stay. If a hotel had done that for your child, would you stay anywhere else?

2. Personalize Customer Relationships 

Keeping your customers happy and satisfied is important for all businesses. Connecting with your customers on a personal level is the key to establishing a long and trustworthy relationship with your business. 

Personalization increases loyalty, drives higher conversions, and ultimately increases revenue.  It is understandable that the path to personalization for some companies is challenging and as a result, marketers have created segmentation strategies rather than building a truly personalized experience.

Consider the below steps in order to build strong customer relationships and achieve brand success:

• Match your tone with your customer’s personality – Some customers prefer short conversations, and some like lengthy ones. You can learn about your customers’ personalities. It will help you to know how to speak and personalize relationships with them.
• Use advanced customer engagement tools – With live assistance tools like co-browsing and video chat, you can collaborate with your customers in real-time and identify issues faster. You can deliver effective, personalized solutions from the first contact. With direct communication, you can build friendlier customer relationships.
• Know your customer preferences – Listen to your customers to identify their needs. Try to learn their preferred contact channels, and how they would like to be addressed. Give your customers the option to choose while enabling them to opt-out when they wish. Knowing your customers’ preferences personalizes the experience and builds their confidence in your brand.

3. Understand Customer Psychology

The essence of customer service psychology relates to customer satisfaction. When you understand your customers’ needs thoroughly is when you are able to boost customer satisfaction rates. Customers expect to be valued, listened to, cared about their problems, and want assurance that the same won’t be repeated in the future. 

Customer psychology can be analyzed and understood based on their behavior and emotions, which will help you serve them better. The main benefits your brand can gain by understanding the psychology of customers are:

• Customer loyalty – when customers are satisfied with your service, they become loyal customers and are associated with your brand. 
• Brand advocacy – when you know your customer’s preferences and interests, you can personalize your conversations and build a strong customer relationship. Later, share their success stories and advocate for your brand. 

When a customer reaches out to you with a complaint or problem, their expectation is to be heard and get the problem fixed as soon as possible. They expect an attentive ear who acknowledges their problem and delivers the right solution. 

4. Prioritize Customer Experience

Customer experience is an integral part of strategies to maintain customer relationships. Brands with superior customer experiences bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.

The three invaluable benefits of building customer relationships that any business can witness are customer loyalty, retention, and referrals. They have a direct impact on the revenue of your business. When customers become loyal, their lifetime value increases, and there are more chances of them recommending you to potential new customers. 

Happy and satisfied customers remain loyal. Understand the customer journey and try to deliver a consistent customer experience across the whole lifecycle. The happier your customers are, the more they will retain your business.

This is why delivering superior customer service becomes crucial for businesses. Qantas Airlines, in order to streamline its operations, invested in the customer experience and set a great example for other brands. 

• Qantas started offering free Wi-Fi on flights that are a rare service.
• Unveiled a faster, streamlined baggage check-in process. 

From flight booking to checking a bag, every aspect of a customer’s journey with Qantas was improved. 

5. Create Value For Customers

How do you hook a customer for a lifetime?

As a brand, you need to focus on creating value for your customers. And you can do so by

• Understanding your customer’s needs – Listen to what your customers say, their actions and reactions to understand what is important to them and look for opportunities to help them.
• Build communities – Communities can have a tangible impact on key business performance indicators. Businesses gain a significant increase in operational efficiency, revenue generation, and customer satisfaction. Hence, customer communities can be identified as one of the primary techniques for building customer relationships.
• Understand your value proposition –  You have to understand what value your products or services create for your customers. What will be their cost in terms of usage?
• Invest in your valuable customers – Allocate your business growth towards new products and solutions that serve your best customers. Customers are the lifeblood of your business. They are the source of current profits and the foundation of future growth. 
• Educate customers – Businesses adopt various marketing ploys to lure prospects. Customers are more likely to trust brands that make an effort to enhance their knowledge about their products or services. Research states that educating customers strengthens their trust in an organization, and it can act as an important service differentiator for brands.

6. Instill Customer Service Etiquette 

62% of consumers worldwide mentioned they had stopped doing business with a brand after a poor customer service experience. This makes the integration of customer service etiquette crucial in every facet of your business, as delivering superior service is the best way to strengthen customer relationships.

Some key customer service etiquette that you can follow are:

Use positive words and phrases

Customers generally switch brands, when they feel the agents are untrained or rude. 70% of the customer’s journey is dictated by how the customer feels they are being treated.  Using the right phrases and words to interact with customers is one of the most important aspects of customer service. Your words create a first impression that goes a long way. 

Positive phrases like – My apologies, I am sorry should be used and negative phrases like – I don’t know, No problem should be avoided.

Practice active listening

Always listen to what your customers say. Make the best use of every opportunity to make your customers feel comfortable, valued, and appreciated. Listening completely, without interrupting what your customers have to say helps identify the exact problem.

Listening actively helps you figure out what exactly your customers want, their opinions, and their feedback so that you can meet and exceed their expectations

Offer gratitude 

The two mere words ‘thank you’ can do miracles when it comes to customer service. When you use words like “Thank you” and “Please” graciously, it develops a feeling of being appreciated, and the bond between the business and customers becomes stronger. 

Show empathy

Dealing with customers, especially when they are having a complaint or facing any issue, can be resolved much faster and easier by using empathetic statements, being patient, and showing consideration. 

Using statements like “I realize how complicated it is to…” or “I’m so sorry to hear that…” can help to build rapport by expressing genuine empathy.

7. Provide Multi Channel Communication Approach

Do your customers know they can reach you with what they need to? Do they know how? Strong customer relationships require active communication. It means your customers need to feel comfortable reaching out. You also need to focus on using software for customer relations management so that the chances of poor experiences go away completely. 

Let your customers know if you are best reached by email, live chat, social channels, text message, or other forms of communication. You should also know how they prefer to be contacted and be actively available to deliver a consistent experience across all channels.

Here are some tips on identifying the channels 

• Understand your target audience – You need to start working out on what platforms your customers are using and how they prefer to interact with brands.
• Choose the right communication channels – Whichever channel you opt for, the overall goal should be to drive conversion while also working in tandem with the other channels to provide a consistent and unified experience to customers.
• Focus on brand engagement – In order to sell your brand and create real longevity, you will need people to interact with you. You should focus on conversational engagement across all channels through which customers reach out to you.
• Tailor your approach to channels – A truly successful multichannel strategy needs content specifically tailored to suit each channel. Ensure that the content is different, but the message is consistent.

Your business will need the right customer support tools to adopt a multi-channel approach. Start a free trial of customer service software and take a step towards providing omnichannel support. 

8. Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Management Tools

CRM is a customer-focused business strategy designed to optimize revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction. The more you understand your customers, the easier it is to target new prospects and boost sales.

Customer relationship management can act as a powerful tool that helps in recording your customer’s product likes and dislikes, their spending patterns, and their location, age, and gender. The CRM software enables you to build up a detailed profile of their tastes, needs, and buying habits.

A CRM system can benefit your business by helping you centralize, optimize, and streamline your communications with customers and enhance the below areas:

• Gain insights about your customers
• Segment customer base in a better way
• Anticipate their needs & interests through consumer modeling 
• Increase customer retention rates
• Faster communication with customers

By using CRM tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, and Infusionsoft, you can identify your most profitable customers, for example, or promising prospects, and target them with marketing messages and offers devised just for them.

9. Appreciate Loyal Customers

How do you maintain good customer relationships?

One good way is by appreciating your loyal customers.

Loyal customers are like assets for your business. They improve your brand’s image by becoming brand advocates through good word of mouth. According to Motista, customers with an emotional connection to a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value, stay with the brand for a longer time, and will recommend it at a much higher rate.

Businesses should go the extra mile by building consumer delight ideas and showing appreciation to loyal customers in the following ways:

• Incentivize Offering discounts, free products, special buying opportunities, and price reductions to loyal customers shows that you value them.
• Premium service – You can offer premium services to your loyal customers like – co-browsing, video chat, and chatbot support. 
• Early access – Early Access program is a reward to loyal customers to give them something exclusive.

Sephora’s Beauty Insider rewards program is globally popular. 

• The program records more than 17 million loyal members, and members make up as much as 80% of Sephora’s annual sales. 
• Customers earn rewards for each purchase based on a traditional point system. 
• The best part is that members can choose how to use their reward points.

10. Acquire Customer Feedback And Act On It

Obtaining customer feedback is one of the techniques used to build customer relationships. 

In order to serve your customers well, you need their feedback and opinion on what you are doing and what needs improvement. Your customer is the best source of information who can provide you with a genuine picture of your product or performance.

The tips you can follow for collecting customer feedback and acting on it:

• Establish a regular feedback loop in which you ask customers to let you know what is working. This shows them that you are there to understand & serve their needs, not just to build your client base.
• You can ask for feedback at the right time such as after the service conversation ends, after a support ticket is resolved or a product demo to gain the most genuine feedback.
• You need to obtain customer feedback effectively. Further, categorize and discuss the feedback with respective departments and implement their suggestions. They feel valued, so show them that you are listening to them. 

Customer feedback not only increases the scope of improvement in the business but also strengthens customer relationships over time.

Final Thoughts 

Building customer relationships is a critical business objective across the globe. If you want to improve brand engagement, give your customers reasons to emotionally connect with you. 

Practically, you have to go beyond CRM and adopt techniques to build and maintain good customer relationships. You can sign up with REVE Chat and have the best tools for building customer relationships.  

And when you have the right tools and customer relationship strategies, it will help you solidify your relationships with customers and create a strong foundation that will help you grow your business to new levels.