Building and maintaining relationships with your customers is vital in sustaining a profitable business
Many business owners are so focused on acquiring new customers and stress on how to get them through the door, that they often neglect strengthening their relationships with their current ones. This mentality will lead to short term success but will ultimately crumble long term because customer experience is just as important as the product or service you are selling. Building and maintaining relationships with your customers is vital for your marketing strategy in sustaining a profitable business because their loyalty is what will lead to reoccurring transactions, brand awareness, and overall growth.
Engage With Your Customers
Always listen to what your customers have to say about your business, good or bad, because getting their feedback is the most valuable aspect in improving your service or product. Make sure to respond with appreciation and truly show it whenever a customer leaves positive feedback on social media. Go beyond the regular process of simply liking their post or comment and instead respond to them. To further build your relationship with them you can even like or comment on one of their posts a week after to let them know you value you them and their business with you.
Never Assume You’re Doing a Good Job
When you don’t actively seek feedback and criticism you can be blind to your own weaknesses and falsely build up your ego in the process. Understand your customers complaints and always value their criticism. Many of us loath criticism and actively avoid receiving feedback but it is absolutely vital in improving your business. As Henry Ford eloquently put it,“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
Put Their Interests First
Listening to your customers goes hand in hand with putting their interests first, after all “the customer is always right”. When we surrender our own wants and desires to hear those of others, it creates an invaluable relationship that will lead to loyalty. Not only is this useful when developing customer relationships but also with every relationship in your personal life as well. Author of How to Turn People into Gold, Kenneth M. Goode, once said, “Stop a minute to contrast your keen interest in your own affairs with your mild concern about anything else. Realize then, that everybody else in the world feels exactly the same way! Then you will have grasped the only solid foundation for interpersonal relationships; namely, that success in dealing with people depends on a sympathetic grasp of the other persons’ viewpoint.”
