Your customers are the most important part of your business, without them you have nothing and your business will fail. While it’s important to have customers and to keep them happy, it’s actually in your interest to build relationships with them and to nurture those relationships. It might feel like this is taking time to do when you could be out getting more customers, but at the end of the day, having loyal customers who keep coming back and people who recommend you to others will make your business far more successful than if you have new customers just the once. If you need to build relationships with your customers then here are some tips on how to do it:
Communicate
It’s well known that the key to any good relationship is communication and your business and customer relationships are no different. While you need to tell your customers about your business, just talking to them isn’t the most effective way to do it, instead, have a conversation with them. Find out what they need from you and how you can help them. Don’t wait for there to be a problem, keep up the communication with your customers and you should prevent problems before they arise. You can use tools such as social media and emails to keep up the communication with your customers, but remember not to overdo it. Use an Email Tracker for Gmail so that you can see if your customer has opened your email multiple times in one day or if they have clicked on a link or attachment. This way you’ll be able to contact them at the right time and not bombard them.
Under promise, over deliver
Start by making sure that you can deliver on what you are offering and promising. While it’s important to be offering something good, to make sure that you meet your customers’ expectations and don’t disappoint them, just don’t tell them how good your business and service is. This way you will exceed their expectations and impress your customers which will keep them coming back. For instance, you can build a melodic atmosphere to suit your premises or in-store needs. Customer flow may vary at various periods throughout the day. You may use a business music streaming service to curate a suitable playlist for each period to create a welcoming and relaxing ambiance. A few commercial music streaming services also allow businesses to boost customer experience by creating streams to suit business areas, such as hotel lobbies, the terrace, bar, or during the main dinner.
Ask for feedback
Customer feedback is essential to your customers’ relationships and just like with any other relationship in your life it’s important to know where you are going wrong and where you could do better. Ask customers to give you their feedback to show that you are interested and are listening to what they have to say. Then when you have it, make sure that you respond to this and take what they say on board. All feedback, good or back is valuable and needs to be acknowledged. Negative feedback is just as valuable too and even if you don’t agree with the feedback, remember that someone has still taken the time to give you this feedback and you should appreciate that.
Appreciate Your Customers
Show your customers that you appreciate them by offering them rewards and discounts. Introduce a loyalty program for those customers who keep coming back. This will not only let them know that you are grateful to the customers you already have but it will entice others to keep coming back.
Photo: Clay Banks, Unsplash