3 ways to improve your relationship with your customers
Customers are the foundation of any business. If nobody wants to buy, there's no reason to build a wonderful product or service. That's why improving your relationship with your customers is essential. A real relationship helps you understand the problems and daily challenges your customers face, and that's where you can help. It also pays off in sales: 79% of consumers like to buy from brands that show they understand their pain points. A good relationship also gives customers confidence that they'll receive a quality product or service. If it doesn't arrive at the expected quality, they'll get human, caring support that solves the problem. Most of the time, those customers become loyal to your brand. In this article we'll share a few ways to improve your relationship with your customers. These aren't ready-made formulas, so treat them as pointers to help you strengthen that relationship. If you follow some of these tips and adapt them to your reality, you'll almost certainly see positive results.
1) Know your customers and build a long-term relationship with them
This first way is the most basic, and no good customer relationship works without it. Think of the people you have the best relationships with: your parents, your partner, your friends. You know them really well, right? The same is the key with customers. Explore and use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to your advantage. They help you understand your customers and prospects, so you can build marketing strategies around that audience. A CRM lets you track people's likes and dislikes and gives you a profile of each one (age, where they live, where they shop, gender, and more). This tool is very powerful for improving customer relationships if you use it well in your business. You don't need every piece of data possible, just the data that matters for your business. With a well-drawn customer profile, you can map where to find them, which leads are hottest, what they'll buy and which pain points they want to solve. Pretty great, right?
Understanding how to build that relationship
That may sound a bit abstract, so imagine this: you sell products for pets, dogs in particular. First of all, you need to know where dog owners are (after all, they're the ones who'll buy) and which products they need right now, or will need soon. In that scenario you have two options: go somewhere with lots of people (dog owners or not) and try your luck selling to whoever stops, or go to a park where you know many dog owners gather and sell your products there. The second option clearly has a much better chance of success, doesn't it? You'll sell more if you're where your customers are, and even more if you become a regular, getting to know their day-to-day reality and spending time with them. That's the idea behind knowing your audience: finding out where to sell with the best chance of success. It was a very simple example, but online, with so many options and niches, CRM tools can be a huge help when planning marketing and customer service strategies.
Other ways to build the relationship
Knowing your customers isn't only about the first part of the sale, which is finding them. It's also about knowing them after they've bought from you. Understanding how their experience with your company went is a great way to find what to improve. Always try to collect customer feedback, so that your relationship rests on mutual trust and on better service. When customers see that their feedback was heard and acted on, they realize that you and your company are committed to improving and to understanding their experience. Delivering a great experience is another way to improve your customer relationships. With a clear picture of who you're looking for and what the people who buy from your brand like and dislike, you can think of them not as numbers or just customers, but as you would think of acquaintances. Think about how you build relationships with people and how important mutual trust is. That's the key to a good customer relationship. Creating this two-way street is essential for an effective long-term strategy. Set up channels where your customers can give you feedback.
2) Deliver the best customer experience you can
Closely tied to the previous tip, delivering an excellent customer experience is another way to improve your relationship with them. This one relates to the "during" stage of their customer journey: the moment when the customer is already buying from you but doesn't have the product yet. It also relates to the "after", but let's take it step by step. During the purchase, it's important to personalize your messages so customers feel comfortable reaching out. Small differences in tone can lead to different responses from different customers, the ones whose profile you already know thanks to tip 1. Imagine you're offering a product to a teenager and to a CEO. Your tone should obviously differ. This basic personalization makes a difference and can affect sales. Another important way to improve your relationships is to listen to what customers have to say, through feedback or through the messages and emails they send you. This helps you understand their pain points and map out ways to solve them. Knowing how to communicate is essential for improving customer relationships. So, besides knowing the right tone, you should have communication techniques that keep you available at all times. When customers run into problems or something they don't understand, their first instinct is to look for answers on your site or somewhere that talks about your products. It's worth noticing that the place they search for help might not even be a site related to your company. Then the solutions won't be tailored to your product, and may not even fix the problem.
Make it easy to solve problems
To avoid this, it helps to have accessible customer support. Your company should answer questions quickly and as well as possible. After all, who doesn't like to have their problems solved fast? You can also support customers through different channels, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, email, phone and more. But remember: what matters is being able to handle every request and answer everyone's questions. If your company can't answer every message well across several platforms, it's better to focus on just one. It's no coincidence that more and more companies, especially in tech, are investing in simple or robust customer education areas. Customer education is when a company uses educational resources to teach its customers how to understand and get more value from its product or service. You don't necessarily have to create full courses. Simple tutorial videos, a knowledge base or other formats can work. See a list of tools available to anyone who wants to educate their customers.
3) Add value for your customers
To improve your customer relationships, everything must be built on trust, and customers need to understand the value of what they're buying. So besides understanding who your potential customers are and how best to serve them, you need to demonstrate the value of your products. There are many ways to do it, but the main one is educating customers about your products and services. Once customers know where the products came from and what they can do with them, their relationship with your company changes completely, from purely commercial to something deeper. Invest in different ways to educate your customers so they can use your products to the fullest. This shows that you and your company care about more than selling: you care about customers getting the most out of what they bought. That kind of transparency and care matters a lot for customer relationships, because it positions your company as different in the market, a more human one.
To improve customer relationships, turn customers into content consumers
Another way to add value to your products is to create communities where users of your products and company can follow the news and share questions and experiences. The sense of community these groups create is remarkable and can be one of the pillars of your customer relationships. These are just 3 ways to improve your relationship with your customers, but you can think of many other ways to build bonds with them. The key takeaway from this article is to always communicate clearly and transparently, and to build the relationship on mutual trust. You can use different approaches before, during and after the sale. That's because your relationship with customers isn't just about selling and moving on. If you're reading this article, you most likely want a better relationship between your company and your customers. So don't focus only on the sale, focus on the complete experience. In every process you can find ways to personalize and improve that relationship.
