5 Tips To Building Better Relationships With Your Customers

Building and maintaining relationships in business is key. You learn what your customers needs are, what their goals are and ultimately how the partnership between you two is going to achieve those goals. As business owner or manager, you have to set the tone, not only for yourself, but for your team to follow your lead.

To build and maintain your customer relations, you must do all you can to stay engaged with them as their business grows and evolves. Here are a few tips that will help you maintain good relations with your customers.

1. Communication: This is the most obvious one. You have to be able to communicate effectively with your customers. There are many different ways to keep an ongoing dialogue with them that keeps the conversation moving forward.
2. Exceeding Their Expectations: Customers expect the best. As a business owner, you more than likely rely not only on yourself, but a number of partners and vendors whose services you use to keep your business moving forward. Your customers expect the same, if not more. In fact, it’s a better mindset for you to be in that says your customers expect more. Going above and beyond what your clients expect is a great key to maintaining your relationships. The surprise factor of delivering your product or service faster than expected is one that will keep them very happy.
3. Get Feedback: There’s an old saying, ‘the customer is always right.’ It’s not always the case, but more than likely, your customer will have some valuable information for you to add to your product/service. They are the connection point between their end user and you, so listen to them when they have suggestions/info.
4. Build Better Ways To Connect: This is sort of a continuation off of number 1: communication. There are a number of tools available for businesses to use that allows simple and efficient communication between partners and customers alike. For us at TheRiot Agency, we use Slack as one of our most effective tools to communicate internally, but with our customers. Slack lets you break your conversations up into topics to keep everything as organized as possible. You can allow and restrict certain people in conversations to allow teams to move forward more efficient.
5. Show Appreciation: Loyal customers are the best customers. Customers become and stay loyal customers because of the relationship you’ve built with them and the successful amount of work that has come out of it. Going out of your way to show your appreciation resonates big time. An email giving gratitude is nice, but it could get lost in a pile of spam and not do anything for you. Take a few minutes, a pen and a notepad to scratch out a letter personally to them. Slap a stamp on that and stick it in the mail. Something as simple as a handwritten note goes a long way in the digital world we live in today. Don’t limit it to the note, be creative, but show that appreciation.