How To Encourage Your Customers To Stay Loyal

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Loyal Customers|How To Encourage Your Customers To Stay LoyalThe money, time and effort that you put into building your business is always at risk. One day without the right number of customers could see your company suffer catastrophic failures, and that’s why it’s so important that you can take steps to attract loyal patrons that will support your business for the foreseeable future. Many businesses can find it difficult to retain customers and encourage them to shop again, yet it really doesn’t have to be this way. There are so many tips and tricks that you can utilise to ensure your business can thrive with repeat patrons that appreciate your service time and time again, and it couldn’t be easier to get started today! So, if you’re ready to find out more about how you can encourage your customers to stay loyal to your business, then read on to uncover some of the best steps that you can follow to see results in no time at all.

Quality Customer Service

It’s absolutely vital that you are able to offer the highest quality customer service to all patrons that come into contact with your business, as this is one of the key features that can influence whether you can secure or lose a customer. Perfecting your customer service skills is such an easy task, as there are so many training courses and guides or tutorials that you can utilise to develop your interpersonal skills and learn how to handle yourself over the phone, via email and in person. This training must be carried through to every member of staff that can come into contact with the public, as your customer service has to be reliable and consistent no matter what. If a customer feels unhappy with the service that they receive then it’s likely they will post a negative review, which can then influence whether other potential customers decide to shop with your business or take their money elsewhere. On the other hand, taking the right steps to provide excellent customer service will motivate happy patrons to leave positive reviews, therefore attracting other people to spend with you too. Customer service can seem like a difficult feat when you operate a business that works solely online, however there are certain techniques that you can implement that can really help in providing constant customer satisfaction.

Make Your Service More Personalised

Quality customer service is extremely important, but it’s equally as important to offer a personalised level of service that really makes your customer feel valued. There are many ways to do this, such as adding business thank you notes to every order or even sending personalised emails to thank them. This is also where you can make good use of the personal information that your customers have been giving you. For example, it’s very common for businesses to send discounts and vouchers when it’s their customer’s birthday. This is a great way to encourage your customers to stay loyal and it’s also a positive influence on their perception of your brand. These small gestures can seem small, but they’ll add up over time and keep your brand in the customer’s mind, ensuring that they’ll use your services in the future instead of choosing a more robotic competitor that doesn’t offer a personalised service. While it can take a little longer to send a personalised message, it’s a great way to establish a stronger relationship with your audience and will certainly make them feel more valued if you’re willing to put in a bit of extra time.

Take Part In Regular Testing

Another essential activity that you must take part in to ensure that you can gather loyal customers is regular varied testing. You have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and use your service to identify whether you have to make any specific improvements, otherwise you will be completely honest the wiser to the faults that might litter your organisation. Gather a few different people, perhaps with varied responsibilities and backgrounds to offer a less biased insight, and test the different features and services that your business can currently offer customers. Collect each individual’s feedback on how they felt their experience went, and utilise this information to move forward and make improvements to increase your levels of customer satisfaction. There are also many other important types of testing that you can explore, including regularly examining the skills and knowledge of glue employees to ensure that they can stay in line with your business’s high standards. Always offer training opportunities and information to those who need it, and encourage an open atmosphere in which employees can share their issues if they should ever have any. As well as this, learning how to understand and assess your SaaS customer health score can aid you in identify some of the downfalls that your company may be experiencing, as it can offer an in depth look into when and potentially why your customers decide to leave your business. There’s no point in gathering all of this information if you’re not prepared to act on it, so it’s important that you can utilise the data that you collect to make improvements and progress to provide a better standard of service.

Encouraging customers to stay loyal has never been so simple when you are able to make the most of the top tips and tricks detailed above! Start off by focusing on the customer service that you provide, ensuring that you and your staff have all of the right training, knowledge and interpersonal skills that are needed to offer the best quality experience. Always take part in regular testing to ensure that you can identify problems and seek solutions in super fast time!

How to Build Customer Relations That Cannot Be Broken

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |build customer relations |How to Build Customer Relations That Cannot Be BrokenAre you a switcher?

Switchers are unhappy customers who switch from one company to another. Across the nation, businesses are losing close to $62 billion every year because of switchers.

As a business owner, you work hard to provide your customers with incredible experiences. However, sometimes things that are outside of your control are going to happen. Thankfully, business owners can learn to build customer relations that survive bad experiences.

Are you ready to find out how to create loyal customers? Read on to find out the secret to building resilient customer relations.

Build Customer Relations

The first step in learning to build customer relations that last is by knowing where you stand.

Here’s a short quiz to evaluate your company’s current customer relations:

  1. Are your customers recommending your company to family and friends?
  2. Are you attracting new customers regularly?
  3. Do you have a positive customer retention rate?

If you can’t answer yes to the questions above it’s probably because you need to improve your customer service in one or more areas. If you want to be a customer service expert, that means you want to build meaningful relationships with your clientele. Depending on the nature of your business and the budget you have at hand, you can achieve this goal by investing in phone systems for small business or training your employees to improve their customer service. Any of these strategies will require resources from your business, but as long as they’re implemented with consistency, these can serve as bridges for your business upon which to build customer relations.

The best way to lay the foundation for any relationship, whether business or personal, is with trust — and it’ll be very easy for customers to trust your brand if you prioritize their needs and provide excellent customer service whenever they reach out to you.

Be Real With Your Customers

Customers can’t trust you if they don’t know who you are. One of the biggest steps in learning to build customer relations involves learning to be yourself.

Customers want to know the real you. While it’s true you can’t come to work and behave the same way you might at home, this doesn’t mean you have to be fake. Authenticity will go a long way with each of your customer interactions.

If you want to be real with your customers, start by letting them know what your business does and what your brand is. Are you a business that prioritizes customer service? Or do you want to be known as a business that provides high-quality products and services? Regardless of what you want your business to become in the eyes of the public, it’s important that you communicate this message properly.

As a business, you should be real with your customers by setting their expectations and letting them know what your business can and can’t do. Transparency is always key when building customer relationships with your target audience.

Ask the Right Questions

One way you can be truly authentic with your customers is by asking them questions that matter. Let’s say for instance that you work in the hospitality industry.

As the customer is getting ready to leave your hotel, ask them, “Will we be seeing you again soon?”. After you ask the question, be quiet and give your customers a chance to answer. There are typically 3 answers your customer will give; Yes, Maybe and No.

Aside from building customer relations that can’t be broken, asking the right questions at the right time can also help your business improve its process. The information you can gain from your customers during this phase can help your business streamline its efforts, so you’ll end up providing products and services that suit your customers’ needs and wants.

Retaining Happy Customers

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. You can always ask customers if they’ll be bringing their business to you again.

If the customer says, “yes”, you’ll know you provided A-class service. However, just because a customer says they’ll return, that doesn’t mean you should end the conversation.

A happy customer is likely to want to share details about their interactions with your company and employees. Taking the time to listen to a customer talk about their positive experience, shows them you truly care. If the competition isn’t willing to really listen, you’ll instantly have a loyal customer.

You can also use the conversation as an opportunity to learn more about what you’re doing that’s working. Perhaps the customer loved the way you packaged their documents, or they enjoy your user-friendly website. The more feedback you can get from customers, the easier it’ll be to keep making them happy.

Winning Back Unhappy Customers

Let’s pretend you ask a customer if they’ll be returning to your business and they say, “maybe”, or “no”. When a customer feels comfortable saying they’re unhappy, you have a golden opportunity to win them back. However, it’s a delicate situation and you have to be careful to position yourself correctly in the conversation.

Contrary to popular belief, winning back unhappy customers is an attainable task. When you come across unhappy customers, take the time to listen to their concerns or complaints. Often, customers are unhappy about a specific business if they were unsatisfied with the products or services given to them. If this is the reason why your customer is unhappy, provide a guarantee that your business will do better moving forward.

Stop Saying Sorry

You never want the customer to feel as if you’re arguing with them or pushing them to choose your company. This is why you should avoid saying “sorry”, and instead show sincerity by actively listening.

Statements like, “I’m sorry to hear that”, can sound like an excuse to customers. It’s also a bad idea to say sorry since you don’t know what the customer’s experience was yet.

One of the best ways to have difficult conversations with customers, is by asking open-ended questions. An open-ended question is one that you cannot answer by saying yes or no. Instead, open-ended questions cause people to think, speak, and reflect on how they’re feeling.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

After a customer tells you they might not be returning to your company, or they’re not coming back, politely ask them why they won’t be returning. You can say, “I don’t want to bother you, we pride ourselves on the experience. Please tell me, why wouldn’t you come back?”

The main idea here is to ask an open-ended question that will help reveal the full story of your customer’s experience. After the customer explains why they’re unsatisfied, make sure you reply with a real response, not something fake.

To keep it real, avoid having employees use scripted responses. Instead, summarize and speak back the story you just heard to the customer. Now, they’ll know you were listening, and they’ll be able to offer any details they may have left out.

Express Genuine Interest

Chances are you’re super excited about the product or service you have to offer customers. Your excitement is contagious and people want to know that you care about your brand and your products. When you’re interacting with your customers, listen more than you talk.

Focus on Customers Life

When you speak with customers, the majority of the conversation should focus on things that have to do with the customer on a personal level. Ask the customer how they are doing, how their family is, what life goals they’re achieving, and so on. If you’re providing a service for their business, find out how their company’s doing.

The more you can learn about your customers, the more you’ll be able to find ways to provide value to them in your relationship. Oftentimes, companies fall into the trap of promoting their specials or deals or packages to customers that don’t need it.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Actively listening to your customers will help you avoid suggesting products or services they don’t need. Sure, a company’s package deal may be great for somebody looking to get a bundle, but what if the customer just wants to buy one thing?

If employees try to push the package deal on them, the customer may leave upset, or worse buy the product and not get enough value. A customer that doesn’t feel heard, or doesn’t receive value from your company, isn’t going to come back.

Small Words Big Sales

Listen to your customers, the smallest things they say can sometimes lead to the biggest sales. Not only will you get sales opportunities, but you’ll also be building meaningful relationships.

Another benefit of listening closely is you’ll create a work culture that cares about the customer first. When new customers see the way you treat your existing customers, don’t want to be a part of it.

Strengthen Every Relationship

Now you know how to use expert customer service to build customer relations. Taking the time to listen to what people have to say, is one of the strongest ways to show you care.

Remember, customer relationships aren’t static, they’re always changing. For more ways to keep up with your customers in the ever-changing market, check out the rest of the site.

5 Ways to Show Customers They Are Valued

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Valued Customers|5 Ways to Show Customers They Are ValuedA satisfied customer is all well and good, but if your customers do not feel as if you value them, you could be facing an uphill struggle for consistent growth. A customer who has bought from you in the past is up to 70% more likely to buy from you again, whereas new prospects may only convert at 20%. It’s not a question of whether or not you should be making your customers feel valued as, without happy customers, you do not have a business; the question is whether you are doing enough to make them feel valued. You must go beyond delivering customer service and take steps to build and nurture trusting and lasting relationships while recognizing them as individuals, not as sales.

Here are five ways you can show customers that they are valued and improve your relationship.

1. Respond to and engage with customers

We all know the frustration of trying to get in touch with a brand and waiting days or even months to get a response. You may feel that you are too busy and push them to the bottom of the list, but when you consider that customers are the lifeblood of your business, this is crazy. Whether you’re a startup with no staff or a huge corporation with thousands of employees, you can make time to reply to your customers in business hours. When you receive messages on social media, positive and negative reviews, or comments on your blog, use it as an opportunity to open up a conversation and show them the human side to the brand.

2. Establish a relationship of trust

Your customers need to have confidence in your brand, which does not happen instantly. If you are considering two products and one salesperson has bombarded you with features, benefits, and prices while the other has taken time to ask you questions about what you are looking for, which are you most likely to trust? When a customer trusts a brand, they are more likely to return to that brand in the future.

3. Try to get to know them

Brands and customers are closer than ever before, and much of this has been made possible by social media platforms. We can get to know people in a very personal way through social media interactions and digital marketing analytics, which will tell us where they are in the world, their gender and age, their interests, their profession, and even their relationship status. With this information, you can tailor not only your marketing but also your product development to reach them on a much more personal level. Find out how to use social media for market research.

4. Give your brand some humanity

Humanizing your brand is incredibly important when it comes to building positive and meaningful relationships with customers. You need to maintain yours professionalism, but allowing your brand’s personality to come through can help to deepen the brand-customer relationship. Customers will see you as more than just a money-making machine and be more inclined to engage. You can do this very effectively through social media such as sharing profiles of your team or behind the scenes photos. You could also give your product packaging a handmade, personal finish with crafted labels using letter stencils or a handwritten note of thanks.

5. Thank them

This leads on nicely to the final but crucial tip – thank you, customers, as much as possible. Whether you include thanks on a contract or invoice, on a written note with the product, in an email, or on social media, you need to make sure that you acknowledge how important your customers are to your success.

Building Better Relationships with Your Customers

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Relationships|Building Better Relationships with Your CustomersIn the modern world, relationships are more important but more complicated than ever. Social media means that we form relationships with people that we’ve never met. It means that we feel connected to our favourite celebrities and brands, even without contact. Communication is available in many different forms, and it’s easier than ever before to get in touch with people.

But it is fast-moving. Our social media feeds are changing at lightning speed, our email inboxes are filling up daily, and even though it’s easier than ever to send a message, it’s often harder to convey meaning without face to face contact and easier to be overwhelmed and miss things entirely. It’s easier than ever to talk, but it’s also easier to be misunderstood and harder to hear.

This can make it very hard for businesses. Today’s consumers expect relationships with the people that they shop with. They don’t just want to be able to make an easy purchase. They want communication, relationships, advice and responses. They want to be able to ask a question at any time of day and get an immediate reply.

For a smaller business without a large team to help, this can prove tricky. You might be wondering How Connected Are You As A Business? In this modern world connectivity is everything, and building relationships with your customers is more important than ever. Here are some ways that you can begin to improve these relationships.

Make Sure It Is Easy For Them to Get In Touch

Everyone uses social media to communicate today, right? Well, actually no. If your target market is primary people in their teens and twenties, they might, but even then, chances are they are using newer platforms like TikTok instead of good old Facebook. If your customers are older, they might still prefer to speak to you over the phone. Every now and then you may even receive a letter.

It’s impossible to know how people prefer to communicate. You can do your research, but even within demographics, the results can vary wildly. The best thing that you can do is give people options. Make sure contact details like your phone number, email, address and social media channels are clearly displayed on your website, but also in any offline marketing materials and on invoices. A simple contact form online can also be hugely effective. Make it as easy as possible by giving your customers options, and make sure you respond to all types of communication, not just those that you prefer to use.

Always Follow-Up

Follow-ups are important. Generally, customers won’t get in touch if there’s a problem, and they are even less likely to get in touch if they are happy with products or services. They walk away from your store, or checkout online and you never hear from them again.

Have a business policy to follow up sales, enquiries and other communications within a certain time. This can just be a quick email or call to make sure everything is going well and to ask if there’s anything that you can help with. This not only boosts relationships, but it also gives you a perfect opportunity to ask for feedback and a chance to make further sales.

Make Customer Service a Priority

Customer service is the most crucial ingredient when it comes to building positive relationships with your customers. It should be something that you insist upon from your staff, and that you spend time training in. Go the extra mile for customers when you can, greet them warmly in-store and take the time to get to know them. Customers should always leave your store happy, with something positive to take away, even if they don’t make a purchase.

Online, customer service is just as important. An easy to use website, fast transactions, easy to find information and clear policies go a long way. Clear communication, fast replies, and a personal touch, with a handwritten note with purchases, or a personal thank you online can also help.

Value Honesty Above All Else

Honesty is so essential when it comes to building relationships and offering excellent customer service. If something is wrong, or a delivery is going to be late; If you can’t deliver the product or service that has been ordered, or changes need to be made, you need to be honest about it.

It can be tempting to hide away when something is wrong, out of fear of letting people down, or conflict. But, most of the time, people would much rather know the truth, and they’ll respect you more for being honest with them. You are more likely to damage future relationships by lying, or not saying anything at all. As soon as you know that there’s a problem, think of ways to make it better, get in touch with your customers and offer them some alternative options. Being proactive like this can even turn a negative into a positive.

Be Realistic

Being realistic is a big part of being honest. You should always aim to under-promise and over-deliver. It’s much better than the other way around. Don’t promise to deliver the next day if it’s not feasible. Don’t offer great deals if you can’t keep it up. Give your customers realistic expectations and set yourself realistic goals, and it will be easier to keep everyone happy.

Ask for Feedback

You can’t keep everyone happy all of the time. Your customers won’t always want the same from you, and you would drive yourself mad, trying to give absolutely everyone what they want. But, knowing what they want is a great start. Ask them. Ask your customers what you are doing well, what you could improve, how they feel about your relationship, how they like to communicate and other basic questions. You can do this on social media, with an email survey, with poles and even face to face.

Appreciate Them

Asking them for feedback is a great way to make them feel valued and appreciated. Another is simply saying thank you. Loyalty schemes can be another way to boost relationships and acknowledge loyalty.

7 Effective Strategies for Managing Customer Data

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StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Managing Customer Data|7 Effective Strategies for Managing Customer DataData is one of the most valuable assets in any organization. Product development, marketing, and pricing, among others, are all influenced by the data the business has. With this, to effectively manage customer data and extract the most value out of it, take note of the strategies listed in this article.

Use a Customer Data Platform

A customer data platform or CDP is one of the most important tools for organizations. It should not be confused with customer relationship management software. The main goal of a CDP is to improve marketing decisions by unifying online and offline data. Whether it is a website or physical store visits, it presents valuable insights that can help make better decisions.

If you are looking for a good CDP to try, check out this link https://www.lytics.com/.

Perform Data Hygiene

Dirty data is useless. It can do more harm than good for the user. Data becomes dirty when it is outdated or inaccurate, among other things that will negatively impact its quality. To implement data hygiene, one of the most important is to have standardization rules. Automatic data cleansing will also be effective. Doing it manually is not only labor-intensive but can also be prone to errors.

Invest in Your People

To effectively manage customer data, you need to invest in your human resources. Your employees have an important role to play in making sure of the quality of data. Provide comprehensive training, especially regarding the use of data management tools.

Collect Only What You Need

Data can be overwhelming. Also, the more information you have about your competitors, the more vulnerable you are to attack. With this, avoid collecting data that you don’t need. Gather only the essential information that you will need when making business decisions.

Be Ethical

Gathering information ethically is also one of the most important strategies in customer data management. When you collect information, be straightforward about how you intend to use the data collected. Provide customers with the option to opt-in if they want to share information. A well-crafted privacy policy is also a must. If you are unethical in data management, you can lose the trust of your customers and this can taint the image of the business.

Create a Backup

Data backups should be non-negotiable. There is a high chance of losing online data, so you need to prepare for the worst. By having a backup and recovery plan, the effects of data loss will be minimal. Otherwise, it can cripple the operations of your business.

Pay Attention to Data Security

Data security is important to protect information from attacks. Whether it is physical or digital means, you need to have proactive measures to prevent a data breach. For online data management, using strong passwords and multifactor authentication will help. Installing antivirus software can also be effective. It will also be good to limit accessibility.

From using a customer data platform to implementing data security measures, this article talked about the best ways to manage customer data. It is crucial to have a comprehensive approach to data management to protect its quality.