6 Ways to Build a Lasting Relationships | SMB Compass
Ezra Cabrera | May 8, 2019
Building a positive relationship with your customers is vital to the success of your business. By striving to create lasting relationships, you’ll generate a steady stream of income from turning new customers to loyal ones. It could even be the key to knowing what your customers need and providing them with it. This leads to more customers, profit, and greater net income. However, it’s important to understand that winning customer loyalty doesn’t happen instantaneously. Much like your personal life, building lasting customer relationships take time, effort, and a little bit of help from Minneapolis business loans.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult. But as an entrepreneur, you should do all you can to reach your customers. You have to go the extra mile and offer them something special. With that said, here are four effective ways to build strong relationships with your customers and keep them coming back:
1. Make an Effort to Exceed Their Expectations
Your customers will love it if you go beyond what is expected of you. Exceeding their expectations is a sure-fire way to enhance customer satisfaction. Your customers will not only keep coming back but also refer your business to friends and family.
Make it a point to ensure that all your customers walk out of your store fully satisfied. Differentiate yourself from your competitors by consistently listening to the expressed needs they share with you. Acknowledge their concerns, and actively go about and correct any issues that may arise. Doing this will build loyalty and repeat sales.
2. Personalize Customer Service through Communication
Don’t bombard your customers with mass email blasts of nonstop offers and ads. They will only end up unread or worse, marked as spam. If you want to truly connect with your customers, you can use customer analytics to understand them better. In this way, you can tailor and personalize the way you communicate with them.
Many entrepreneurs still think that customer communication is purely promotional. Communicating with your customers doesn’t mean you have to always be selling them something. You can promote good-will by sending them emails about special features, major industry developments, and annual birthday greetings.
3. Invite Customer Feedback
Inviting customer feedback demonstrates to your customers their opinion matters – whether it’s good or bad. Encourage them to leave a review by placing comment cards on your counters, conduct a survey, or direct them to give an online review on platforms like Google My Business.
When your customers post issues or concerns regarding your product or service, make sure you find the best solution to their problem. If you handle their complaints with efficiency, your customers will appreciate it and your business will grow. Customer feedback is always valuable, so make sure to listen and reply to comments as quickly as possible.
4. Show Your Appreciation
Remember, your customers are the life-blood of your business. Without them, you don’t have a business. Openly honor their loyalty by offering discount programs to long-time customers. This can be in the form of loyalty cards or even the use of your own branded APP.
5. Make Waiting Time as Short as Possible
The reality is that no one likes to wait, especially now that technology is available to make things easier and faster. Because of that, a lot of customers now find it unsatisfactory to keep them waiting in line for hours. If your business then does that, you may lose customers – both new and returning – to your competitors.
Related: 5 Technology Trends that Will Revolutionize Small Businesses
If your business is experiencing this, the best way to defuse the situation is by leading your customers every step of the way. You can also incorporate these simple techniques to make sure that your customer’s time will be preserved:
- Maintaining active communication
- Providing an estimated waiting time
- Providing quick replies to make the process faster
6. Sense Their Pace
At some point, you’ll encounter customer calls that are asking for a quick fix or in a hurry to get answers. When this time comes, be sure to skip the pleasantries and go directly to the point. But be sure to sense if they also want to chat, too. Customer satisfaction is the key to effectively building a lasting relationship with your customers. So, be sure to provide that, even though it’s as simple as giving quick solutions to their problems.
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To build and maintain lasting customer relationships, invest time and effort in improving your level of customer service, products/services, and overall customer experience. However, like any other business strategy, you would need to prepare a significant amount to enforce these techniques. If you need additional working capital to run your business, applying for Minneapolis business loans is the best way to go. The approval process is quick, given that you provide all the requirements the lenders ask for.
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