It is well known that the acquisition costs are lower for existing customers compared to new ones. According to one Gartner report, 80% of a company’s revenues come from 20% of its clients. A strong relationship with customers is essential to your business continuity and subsequently lower acquisition costs.
Here are a few tips to help organizations strengthen their relationship with clients.
Understand the Client’s Needs
A CEI Survey suggests that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. But at the same time, just one percent of these customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations. Understanding your customers’ needs is perhaps the first and foremost step in establishing a strong relationship.
Give New Relationships Time to Build
Strong relationships take time to build. As a seller, the focus needs to be on establishing a process that enables your business to offer a predictable and consistent service to your customer. This includes predictable billing, consistent delivery and an always-available customer support.
With such a process pipeline, customers do not have to worry about their needs getting fulfilled and this habituates them into using your product or service. And this habituation is necessary to build a solid relationship.
Seamless Processing and Customer Service
After-sales service is more important than the sale itself. Deploying your product, onboarding the customer, and resolving customer complaints as and when they arise, demand your time and effort.
As a business, your focus should be on making your customers’ lives easier and more efficient. Every minute they spend with you in deploying your product or servicing a complaint is money they potentially lost. Creating a seamless experience that ensures quick servicing is paramount to building customer confidence which goes a long way in establishing a strong relationship.
Self-service portals have become popular in recent times to enable such seamless servicing. Such client portals let customers perform a number of routine tasks like raising invoices, paying for services and filing tax paperwork instantaneously and without human interference.
Support portals that let customers seek help and get issues resolved without manual intervention also reduce waiting times on issues resolution and thus build customer confidence.
Go that Extra Mile
Who does not like freebies in life? If you want to strengthen the client relationship then try to walk the extra mile for them. At times, you might have to bend over backwards to accommodate your clients’ needs. Customized solutions offer your business an opportunity towards bespoke high end services. However, be cautious the idea is not to take a hit on your bottom line.
The idea is to generate profit by modifying the service or product wherever you can, while at the same time ensuring that your customers get exactly what they want.
Conclusion
Building and managing client relationships is an art that every business needs to master. Providing great service paves the way for customer confidence which in turn results in higher customer loyalty and a stronger relationship.
