How to Develop Consistency in Customer Relationships

Customer relations is one of the most important and difficult to maintain aspects of running a successful business. It’s through attentive, efficient, and friendly relationships with customers that you will be able to bring in new clients, retain existing customers, and receive referrals from those who love your product and trust in your business.

But those positive relationships do not develop overnight. You need time and a concentrated effort between all departments within your company to foster such meaningful partnerships with your audience.

In a lot of ways, developing positive customer relationships is like developing a personal relationship. You establish contact through a meeting and over time build trust and fondness between the two parties until a long-term meaningful connection is established.

We here at Freshdesk have broken the process of establishing and maintaining positive relationships with customers into four main categories.

Let’s take a look at them together.

1. Focus on Collaboration

Teamwork makes the dream work. That’s not just a campy line from a 1986 New York Mets music video. It’s actually true in both the worlds of sports and business.

Every department in your company, including sales, marketing, and customer support need to work together throughout the customer journey. Some companies have an unfortunate mentality that their various departments don’t have to communicate. In the business world, this is called “siloing.”

Siloing only hurts your service. Businesses that adopt this mentality are typically marked by a reduction in both efficiency and morale.

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You can create a truly cooperative and efficient environment within your company by making time for these groups to collaborate and work together.

That will help you to create a consistent customer experience and go on to build that consistency into your relationships. When a customer has an amazing experience with your sales staff, that’s a wonderful first step on the road to positive relations. But if, once they sign on, they are treated poorly by the marketing department, all of that relationship building work will have been for nothing.

Collaboration between departments can also bring out opportunities to upsell and cross-sell with existing happy customers. Maintaining that positive communication and ensuring excellent customer relationships across the board can lead to a more respected and profitable business in the future.

2. Improve With Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is incredibly important. It’s vital for all businesses to take the constructive criticism of their customers and use it to create a more engaging and fulfilling consumer experience for the future.

When you listen to your customers and improve based on their feedback, it shows that you care about them and what they have to say. Brand monitoring is vital for customer support and ensures that there’s not a massive disconnect with your audience.

One of the most effective modern tactics for brand monitoring comes in the form of Net Promoter Score surveys or NPS for short.

An NPS survey is one question offered to the customer at a predetermined time in the sales lifecycle that serves to gauge how well you are doing in meeting their needs.

Net Promoter Score helps you see how willing customers are to recommend your business to a friend by asking them to rate you on a numerical scoring system.

This allows you to determine what percentage of your audience are detractors who are likely to openly bash you or discontinue their services, passives who are content but not willing to take action, and promoters who are thrilled with what you’re doing and will likely recommend you to friends and colleagues.

Customer effort score tells you how easy or hard it is to complete a task or use your service. This valuable insight places your employees inside the customer experience and lets them know how efficient your system is.

Customer effort scores can help you to determine issues with your point of sale system, customer support department, fulfillment centers, and more.

Minor bugs and annoyances are one thing. All businesses have them. But when you notice customers consistently generating support tickets and rating your overall CES score in the red, that’s not the consistency you want. It means that there’s a persistent problem and your team needs to fix it.

Once customers realize that their collective voice has been heard and that their feedback leads to actionable effort, you will see that they are willing to overlook past transgressions in the name of improvement and progress.

3. Keep Your Promises

Just as it is important in your personal relationships, keeping your promises is essential to maintaining trust and positive relationships with your customer base.

Trust is a sacred thing. Once it is broken it’s hard to put back together. When your company makes a promise to your customers, it creates an expectation. When money is changing hands under a set of expectations, any violation of that trust can be a huge deal.

Oftentimes an eager salesperson will overstep their boundaries, making grandiose promises that the company can’t actually deliver on, just to close the sale and get that commission. If I’m a customer and a salesperson promised me something that was not delivered on, I would be utterly livid. That’s how businesses receive a bad reputation and the damaging label of “scam.”

Your marketing has to entice visitors. Your sales team has to close on those (and maybe more) promises. And then your product and services need to deliver.

It has been reported that most customers leave a business because of poor treatment. Not following through on promises falls into that category and is one of the fastest ways to lose both money and reputation.

It’s incredibly important that you as a company make sure that you’re following through on all promises made throughout the marketing and sales process. If, for some reason, you find your business unable to make good on a promise, you need to explain why to the customer and offer up something else to make it right.

4. Automate the Easy Issues

Automation is the future of business. As technology advances, automation becomes easier and more effective.

The last thing you need to do is over-complicate simple, easy to fix issues. Automating ticket replies for common issues is a great way to consistently ensure high-quality support without wasting time or making things worse.

One great example of automation is the use of a chatbot. These artificial support representatives are available to customers 24/7 and can field some of the more simple or commonplace questions that your audience might need answering.

Even automating your voice assistant can help improve consistency, as well as minimize wait or hold times. Automation can also be expanded for email follow-ups and the distribution of marketing materials.

Using a bot takes human error out of the equation. If something needs to go out to a customer on a certain day at a certain time, leaving that work up to an automation system ensures that a forgetful memory won’t be to blame for losing you business.

Everything is instant today, in the home and in business. As such, customers are demanding fast and efficient service that operates at the speed of light. By automating some of your simpler services you save the attention of flesh and blood employees for more detailed and difficult tasks that will require their full concentration.

First Impressions Count

The old saying goes, you only get one chance at making a first impression. That’s important to remember in life as well as in business. From the time you meet a new prospect, you want to make sure that you are putting your company’s best foot forward.

Impress them at hello, but don’t stop there. Employ these four tent poles of customer service success throughout your entire organization.

1. Work together and avoid siloing
2. Take customer feedback seriously and implement it to improve your business
3. Keep all the promises that you make to your customers. Never give them a reason to doubt your integrity
4. Automate easy to solve issues to create a well-oiled machine of productivity.

Remember, customer service is arguably the most important aspect of running a successful business. People are willing to pay more to do business with a reliable company that treats them fairly.

Go above and beyond for your customers and they will go above and beyond for you. Unhappy customers talk, but so do happy customers. Make your audience a branch of your marketing department. Keep them happy and they will spread the word for you.