Effective Strategies for Building Stronger Customer Relationships

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Imagine two companies offering identical products or services to the same people for the same price. If one of them cultivates stronger customer relationships, it will surely achieve greater success.

Customer relationships encompass all the strategies a company employs to connect and engage with their audience on a deeper, individual level. Customers who feel a deeper connection to a brand are more inclined to explore your new offerings, and recommend them to others. Not only will you retain existing customers but also attract new ones.

Whether your customer interactions go in person or online, fostering strong relationships with them can give you many advantages:

• improve customer satisfaction;
• gain favorable reviews about your services;
• get a better understanding of your customers;
• encourage repeat purchases;
• boost sales and loyalty.

There are many strategies your company can use to develop customer relationships. While it may require some experimentation to discover the right approach for your specific needs, here are some tips that work pretty much for any business and niche.

Measure KPIs to improve customer satisfaction

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Start by identifying the main areas you want to monitor and convert them into KPIs. You can use various metrics, from CSAT (customer satisfaction) and NPS (net promoter score) to CES (customer effort score), which will all give you a 360-degree view of your customers’ experiences. These metrics will help you assess different facets of positive customer interactions, including how easy it is for them to engage with your product and how likely they will recommend it to others.

After collecting the necessary data, develop strategies to boost customer satisfaction. Almost any aspect of customer experiences can be quantified, allowing you to create relevant KPIs. Use them as a basis for the ongoing assessment and improvement of your customer service efforts.

Develop a customer-oriented culture in your company

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Building a customer-oriented culture in your company can help you put their needs and expectations at the forefront. Customers should not only receive outstanding service but also feel appreciated. Make sure your team has a customer-centric mindset and motivation to take responsibility for their interactions. While the specifics may vary by industry, fundamental principles like active listening are universally applicable.

By gaining customer feedback through surveys, you can evaluate your service quality and leverage this data to set objectives for further improvement. This approach lets employees propose enhancements and innovations to meet evolving customer needs. Don’t forget to acknowledge your team for their valuable ideas and exceptional service. By fostering their desire to excel, you’ll find it easier to develop a customer-oriented attitude in your company.

Make emotional connections with customers

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You may think that emotional connections aren’t relevant to your company, but the truth is they are essential for any customer-oriented business. Making an emotional connection can be as simple as providing personalized service and valuing customer feedback. When customers feel acknowledged, it leads to their satisfaction.

Establishing trust with customers is quite simple. By being open and responsive, you will earn a reputation as a reliable business. Ensure that customers have a clear understanding of what to expect from your products, and they will have no reason to question your reliability.

Collecting customer data plays a crucial role in this respect. You can leverage it to enhance their experience, e.g. address them by name in chatbots or customize offers based on their previous purchases. Feedback gathered from customers, like survey responses, can also help pinpoint areas that need improvement.

Build an online community on social media

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Building an online community around your business is an excellent way to cultivate positive relationships with customers. Social media can be an ideal platform for this purpose, allowing you to provide prompt responses and guide both potential customers to your site. Your team can also address their concerns via chatbots, which makes social media perfect for delivering efficient customer support.

Make sure you choose social networks aligning with your industry best. If you run an IT company, you’ll definitely find more success on LinkedIn or Twitter rather than Instagram. Understanding your target audience, their interests and pains, will help you determine the most suitable networks.

To nurture your community, make it a habit to post and interact with users consistently. By hosting webinars and similar online gatherings, you can show your expertise and build credibility, while educating customers with minimal investment. And if you are lucky to get your topics trending, you might just find your engagement levels soaring.

Create loyalty programs to reward your customers

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When customers feel appreciated, they are more likely to remain loyal, and initiating this process is quite simple. Implement loyalty and rewards programs that provide discounts or bonuses for repeat purchases. Offering exclusive discounts or free delivery typically requires minimal investment but can significantly enhance customer retention.

To design personalized loyalty programs, you can use the customer data you have collected. Such an approach will help you foster a personal connection with your customers. They are more willing to return to brands that previously delivered a personalized experience.

Use a CRM platform to streamline customer interactions

To manage customer relationships in your company, you need a CRM platform. This kind of software can let your team centralize all customer interactions in a single place and convert them into insightful data that you can then analyze to improve your services. 

If you’re ready to set up a CRM for your business, check out a few solutions combining advanced functionality with ease of use and, just as important, a flexible pricing policy.

Salesflare

Salesflare is an AI-powered CRM that can help small and medium-sized businesses boost sales through customer relationship intelligence. It takes the data from inboxes and calendars and transforms it into a comprehensive, easy-to-navigate address book. From there, you’ll access the details of everyone your teammates have ever been in touch with. 

Visual pipelines make it easy to manage leads and sales due to drag-and-drop functionality. Built-in metrics can help you measure how strong each relationship is, how frequent your team interacted with each lead, and when was the last time they did it. By filtering metrics, you’ll come up with lists of people that are more profitable for your business.

Tracking a lot of minor yet important tasks can become quite challenging. That’s what Salesflare will take care of through automation. The system gives automatic suggestions to add contacts and accounts, enriching them with public data from LinkedIn or other sources. Instead of manually copy-pasting leads’ contact details, you can rest easy getting this data automatically imported from their email signatures.

With automated reminders to reply and follow up, no conversation will get lost in your inbox. You’ll know exactly when to reach out due to Salesflare’s lead scoring feature. It analyzes previous interactions with leads and triggers notifications at the time when they’re more responsive.

Thanks to integration with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, the platform lets you manage contacts right from your inbox. You can track how recipients interact with your emails - open them, click links, visit pages, etc. If you have to handle a lot of repetitive messages, just turn them into templates and reuse as long as you need.

Copper

Copper is a CRM platform designed specifically for Google Workspace. It integrates effortlessly with Gmail, Calendar, and Drive, allowing you to manage leads, track email interactions, locate files, and oversee tasks, all without switching between multiple tabs. You can set it up fast - just connect your Google Workspace accounts, and the system will import contact details and email threads automatically.

As a Gmail CRM, Copper can let you add new contacts from your inbox via their Chrome extension. With templates, automations, and merge fields, you can speed up your email conversations. Your Google Calendar will have event information, customer interactions, and relevant materials, without interrupting your workflow. To quickly find Google docs and other files, you’ll have them automatically synced with your Copper contact records.

By setting automated reminders and tasks, you won’t miss a thing in your business development. Visual pipelines make it easier to see what stage of your sales process each lead is at, while with drag-and-drop functionality, it takes a few clicks to move opportunities to next stages. When managing deals, you can sort them by value and easily spot which ones are about to slip.

Copper will put an end to time-consuming repetitive work. You can build smart workflows to automatically create tasks, update customer profiles, attach files, change the status of each deal, and more. Just choose a necessary trigger, and the CRM will handle the rest for you. Its built-in reporting tool will give you full visibility into your business performance and growth. You can create reports and schedule their delivery to your employees or stakeholders who won’t even need to have a Copper account to access them.

Insightly

Insightly is a cloud CRM platform supplied with modern, AI-powered features designed to scale fast-growing businesses. Being easy to set up and use, this CRM will help you speed up your sales process. You can capture leads’ details, set priorities, and track where each of your deals stands in real time. Customizable pipelines make it easier to manage opportunities, revealing what helps your business grow and what poses a risk to it.

Thanks to intuitive, automated workflows, your team will be free from repetitive work that brings little value. Not only will automations eliminate human errors but also increase productivity. Your employees will have more time to close deals, delivering faster services to customers. With advanced permissions and validation rules, you’ll make sure only the right roles or profiles will get data access.

Insightly provides functionality to create smooth post-sale transitions and improve cross-team communication with milestones. By capturing all the details of every interaction with leads, you’ll prove you know well about their preferences. Every company has their own needs, yours is not an exception. Due to intuitive customization options, you can configure this CRM in line with your business requirements.

Data visualization is another strong point of this platform, allowing you to create customizable charts with the key metrics you’re focused on. Having all the KPIs organized in one place, you’ll easily make data-driven decisions based on how your business is evolving. Insightly will let you set up a single source of information, saving you a lot of time on handoffs across different departments.

Teamleader

Teamleader comes packed with all the must-have features, including automatic follow-ups, templates, in-depth reports, support for Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, and integrations with over 200 tools. This CRM will keep all your customer information and communications organized in one place - timesheets, contracts, quotes, anything. No need to waste time searching for previous discussions. With their mobile app, you can access the necessary data even when you’re on the go.

The platform provides usability, allowing you to easily import all the customer details from your inbox or calendar instead of re-entering it manually. By filtering your database, you’ll find the necessary information in no time, while an advanced search will make the whole process more convenient. As for new customers, you can automatically add them using their business card or LinkedIn account. 

For easier tracking, customer interactions are shown on a chronological timeline, anything from inbound and outbound emails to meetings and invoices. You’ll see where each prospect stays in your sales funnel to figure out what stages are remaining for them to convert into paid customers. If you offer many products, you can monitor each of them in a separate pipeline.

Teamleader’s accounts have a start-stop feature, allowing you to monitor the time your team spends on phone calls, meetings, and tasks. That way, you can make the time associated with a certain customer billable. What makes Teamleader stand out is the way their solutions interconnect and enhance one another. For example, when you update customer information, those changes automatically reflect in all your invoices and quotations.

Visme

While Visme is not a CRM platform, it can still help your team improve customer relationships through sales content creation. The tool provides a wide range of templates to design sales materials of any sort and kind. From pitch decks and product sell sheets to whitepapers and other sales collateral, you can get them ready in minutes, without acquiring any design skills or mastering complex software like Photoshop. 

Visme Forms can let you gather insights from your customers via surveys, reviews, and feedback forms. It will help you better engage with customers, close more deals, and improve customer success. Integrated analytics make it possible to track views, visits, and other activity to identify interaction patterns and optimize your sales content strategy accordingly.

Their Brand Wizard gives an opportunity to create branded sales materials with ease. Just enter your website’s URL, and the tool will automatically apply your business logo, colors, and fonts to all your content. To make it more engaging, you can animate objects, use hover effects, and embed interactive pop-us. Built-in data visualization tools can turn complex information into easy-to-digest graphs, colorful charts, and visually appealing infographics.

The platform is perfect for team collaboration, allowing you and your employees to stay organized with tasks, deadlines, and completion rates. Instead of switching between lots of email chains, you can move from the draft to the final version in one place. With all the features Visme offers, you’ll speed up your sales pipeline and make sure your customers are never neglected.

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