With so many products and services in the market today, standing out requires more than a top-notch offering.
Any business looking to capture a market needs to build meaningful customer relationships that last. This is more important for small businesses because they tend to rely on these relationships.
If your competitor is a massive brand, the only thing that will truly set you apart is your relationship with customers.
In this article, we’ll go over the importance of cultivating customer relationships and what small businesses can do to achieve them.
Let’s get started.
What Is Customer Relations?
The basic definition of customer relations is the relationship your business has with your customers.
However, it entails more than that – customer relations is the sum of all efforts that help enhance the customer experience (CX).
In any case, there are a few things that make up this experience:
Your customers’ feelings about your business.Â
Your approach to interacting with your customers.Â
The process of addressing customer issues.
These factors help build and maintain customer relationships by ensuring a good customer experience.
This also means there’s no single strategy or solution for customer relations. It’s an iterative process of continuous improvement.
Furthermore, it’s important to keep in mind that customer relationships rely on employees as much as they do on your brand and offerings.
Every single customer touchpoint needs to be optimized to provide good customer experiences.
Long-Term vs Short-Term Customer Relationships
Small businesses can adopt multiple approaches for building and maintaining customer relationships. However, it’s important to divide them into long-term and short-term approaches.
Let’s say you provide automotive repair services. You’re about to start a mobile mechanic business to provide direct services.
At this point, you may go for a short-term approach: building a good enough relationship with your customers to get referred to other people. It will help spread the word about your newly added service among the local community.
However, if you were to adopt a long-term approach, your methods would include providing value to customers.
A great way to do that is to integrate content marketing goals into your inbound strategy. This way, you can start producing useful content for customers.
For example, you can provide how-to articles on what to do when faced with different automotive issues. That way, any vehicle owner’s first thought would be to check your content for a solution.
If it’s an issue that requires professional services, your content will help drive sales because customers trust your brand now.
At that point, all you have to do is continue getting their feedback and further improving the CX.
The short-term approach will work by allowing people to find out about your small business. However, the long-term approach will allow you to build a brand that people trust and follow.
Importance of Customer Relationships for Small Businesses
Small businesses thrive on repeat sales and frequent referrals. It’s hard to bring in new leads regularly, so it’s more cost-effective to maintain longer customer relationships.
It also allows you to set the foundation for success down the line. With limited marketing and sales budgets, building good relationships ensures a steady inflow of business.
Building such positive customer relationships regularly will help you with:
Customer acquisition – Providing a good customer experience will build trust with customers. If your customers feel that they can rely on your business for something they need, they will opt for it even if there’s an alternative with a larger setup.Â
Word of mouth – Once you acquire customers and provide good experiences consistently, there’s a good chance they will refer your business to others. If you can run referral promotions, there’s a higher chance of customers opting for those promotions.Â
Customer retention – Many businesses struggle to maintain and retain customers. There’s a good chance that a larger business is offering a cheaper alternative to your offering. The only way you can continue to retain your customers in these cases is to give them something to stay for. If customers believe they have a close relationship with your business, they will be willing to pay a premium to stay with you.Â
Customer satisfaction – Consistent customer satisfaction is possible if you keep taking customer feedback and building on it. A good customer relationship will make it easier to gather feedback and understand customer needs. That will help you continuously improve the customer experience for better customer satisfaction.Â
Conversing with your customers will always help increase sales whether you mention your products and services or not.
How to Cultivate Meaningful Customer Relationships
Good customer relationships open up multiple avenues for your business. For example, it allows your sales teams to upsell to customers.
From a customer standpoint, positive experiences help increase spending. In fact, compared to customers with bad experiences, customers with positive experiences spend up to 140% more.
To get to that point, you can utilize the following tactics.
1. Focus on the Human Element
Depending on your target audience, you need to maintain your business’s tone and conversations accordingly. You have to look authoritative but also friendly and relatable.
A transactional approach will never allow you to build a meaningful customer relationship.
To add the human element to your conversations and business practices, you can:
Adopt a more hands-on approach by providing in-person customer service. If you’re a remote business, you can offer video customer service.Â
Get your employees to be more human on social media. Adding humor and personality in interactions helps improve engagement.Â
Take the extra step with each customer with follow-up calls, thank-you messages, and personalized messages.
Show your customers that your small business is part of the community.
2. Listen to Customers
As a small business, you can easily listen to each customer’s individual feedback and provide personalized responses.
While online reviews and feedback always help, you can encourage additional feedback.
Give your customers surveys to learn what they want and think. Encourage online comments by engaging in conversations and utilize polls to determine what customers want next.
Most importantly, once you get good feedback, act on it to show customers you’re listening. It’s also a good idea to share with the customers that you did something after receiving a customer tip.
It reinforces the idea that your business listens to its customers.
3. Upgrade Your Social Media Game
Tied to the previous point, social media presents a tremendous opportunity to connect with customers. Today, most customers will interact with your business through social media.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to be present on all, or at least most, social media platforms.
More importantly, focus on creating good social media content. Go easy on the self-promotion posts and focus on providing value and entertainment.
This will help build trust in your brand while also allowing customers to relate to your brand.
That way, when you do share a self-promotion post, you’ll notice a better response.
4. Make Your Employees Your Brand Ambassadors
Your customer-facing employees represent what your business is all about. This includes the employees who run your social media and customer service reps too.
These employees should have the power to build, maintain, and improve customer relationships. For example, you can allow each employee to offer a 10% discount to customers if that will help build a better relationship.
Furthermore, your employees should be able to provide solutions to customer problems immediately. Empower each employee to be able to provide custom resolutions for customer issues.
This will help reduce resolution times, improve customer satisfaction, and boost employee engagement.
Final Thoughts
As a small business, there’s a good chance you can manage individual relationships with customers.
However, as you continue to scale your business, it will become harder to keep track. That’s why it’s a good idea to invest in customer relationship management (CRM) software.
CRM software allows you to keep tabs on customers. It also allows you to automate certain experiences.
As a result, you’ll be saving on costs while building more customer relationships and scaling your small business.
Ellie Shippey is a blogger and contributor to Axle Eight a digital marketing company focusing on the Real Estate, Construction, Tech Company, and FinTech verticals.
