Relationships are often regarded as the key to business success.
Once a foot is in the door, it’s all smooth talking, right?
No! Turning initial relationships into strong and fruitful ones can be tricky and should not be taken lightly. The success of your business depends on a healthy and (if possible) friendly relationship with your customers, whether you provide a service to the general public or professionals. How do you inspire confidence and retain your target? By ensuring you steer clear of these six mistakes that can prove fatal to any customer relationship.
Error 1: Not moving to the beat of your customers
We all have different music tastes and every customer is unique and wants to be considered as such. Nothing is more annoying than automatic emails that have been sent to a badly segmented contact database.
In the days of personalised advertisements, it has never been so critical to ensure that every message is personalised to the intended audience, wherever possible. A good start is by using the proper names of your customers and targeting your messages. Automated marketing is an excellent tool for target marketing. It makes it possible to establish email scenarios according to your customers history. With this, you’re on to a killer customer relations plan!
Error 2: Forgetting the unique approach
Every customer needs to know you understand their needs. You need to be the support and reassurance they didn’t know they needed. It’s essential to know who you’re talking to, whether it’s a new or regular customer. Yes, you can carry on adapting your sales proposals to your customers, but in the end it all comes down to reassuring them that you can provide the support they require, taking good care of them.
Every customer is unique, so when speaking with multiple customers a day remember individual exchanges and their individual needs. With a CRM solution in place, you can archive exchanges with customers and centralise that information, keeping everything organised, especially if your customers are made up of multiple collaborators.
Error 3: Missing the silver platter of communication
No-one wants to be taken to spam city and nothing is more irritating than unsolicited sales messages. You always want to be remembered and reminding your customers to remember you is a good idea of course, but doing it too frequently and filling up their inboxes will have a negative impact on your company’s brand. Instead, remember to be subtle. By tracking your customers’ activity, you can better identify the questions they are asking themselves. Then, deliver them the one single response on a silver platter.
Error 4: Closing the door on customer feedback
With social media at the beck and call of every customer, how should you ask for feedback? Whether it’s positive or negative it needs to be received without censorship. Customers need to feel they can express themselves, provide honest opinion, and in turn receive personalised feedback.
At all times you need to remain speedy and responsive through whichever form of contact they’ve chosen, whether on social media, blog comments, by mail, or email. Unhappy customers on Twitter have the equal potential to publicly praise you if you bring them a kind and quick solution to their problem.
Error 5: Don’t forget to spoil your customers
Customers aren’t just there for events such as Christmas or Black Friday, and they don’t come back automatically. Customers need to be reminded that they’re not at the end of your to-do-list and you care about them all year round, as well as when it comes around to renewal time. To ensure they continue with you, it’s necessary to offer them new deals. Show them that they are important.
Retaining the high level of quality customer support at all times will stand you in good stead when that dreaded renewal date comes along. Remember, a customer is never loyal or unloyal just by chance.
Error 6: Providing an opaque service
Every customer wants to sit back and enjoy the good service your team has promised to provide. However, should a problem arise they’ll want a transparent service, one without a badly thought-out website and unclear terms and conditions. Forget this classic false strategy of saying anything just to arouse the curiosity of customers, hoping that they will contact you. If you want to inspire confidence, it’s better to expose yourself (without bragging of course) in a clear and intelligible way. Inspire the confidence you’d want to see in your marketing team.