3 Tips for Building Successful Customer Relationships

Have you ever lost a client and afterwards realized that you didn’t do the right thing? Then you know the importance of good customer relationship management.

Customer relationship management is essential for two reasons. An unsatisfied customer will leave the brand and potentially damage the company’s image. And it is easier (and cheaper) to keep existing customers than to win new ones. But in practice, what does it mean to “succeed in customer relations”? 2 things: improving customer satisfaction and retaining as many customers as possible.

#1  Being Permanently Attentive to Your Customers’ Needs

What do you think an unsatisfied customer does almost immediately? Easy, you think: he complains! Wrong. 96% of unsatisfied customers don’t even complain. They will just leave the business without contacting customer service. Most of the time, you won’t even know why they decided to stop doing business with you. So you won’t have the opportunity to change their minds.

But then, if they don’t contact your customer service department, how do you manage to find the source of their dissatisfaction? By listening! Both proactively and reactively. To do so:

• Facilitate the expression of discontent by asking for feedback and making it easy to contact you.
• Keep a constant watch on what is being said about your brand offline and online.

#2 Personalize Customer Interactions

Customer relationships are essential to satisfy and retain your customers. Successful customer interaction is one that increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, if you want to build customer loyalty and even increase your revenues by cross-selling or upselling, you can’t treat each customer the same way.

Each customer has a different profile, issues, needs, expectations and behaviours. It is customer knowledge that will allow you to adapt your offers and messages to maintain the relationship and generate additional revenue. How can this be done?

Firstly, by adopting solutions (marketing automation, CRM) that will enable the analysis of interactions between the customer and the brand. Then, by putting this data at the service of an increasingly personalized experience.

A simple and concrete example of customer relationship personalization? Amazon’s personalized recommendations. Depending on the pages you’ve visited or the items you’ve ordered, you’ll be offered suggestions based on your history.

#3 Automate Recurring Tasks

The majority of customer service calls are always about the same requests. What will happen if you don’t automate? Your customer service representatives will spend the day repeating the same thing dozens of times to different customers.

This represents a significant waste of time, and therefore budget, for low value-added tasks. That’s why it’s desirable to automate recurring tasks such as responding to the most frequent complaints.

Generally speaking, what is repeated more than 10 times a day by one of your employees can and should be automated. Internally, automating these tasks will meet two major customer interaction challenges: reducing the contact rate and controlling the budget.

Another advantage of AI consulting automation is that it allows you to disseminate business expertise internally. Indeed, the information will be generalized and standardized to offer the best possible response, the one that generates the most satisfaction and does not require additional follow-ups.