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Good customer relationships are essential to every business. Once you have customers, you need to actively manage your relationship with them. Here are some important things to do.

Build customer relationships

Building strong relationships with customers helps your business in several ways:

  • Your customers stay loyal to your business.
  • You attract new customers with good word of mouth.
  • You build a good reputation and increase the value of your business.
  • Feedback from customers helps you improve your business.

Understand your customers

Do market research to better understand who your customers are and what they need. This helps you identify their pain points and how you can solve them.

Communicate with customers

Regularly communicating with your customers increases their trust in you and the knowledge you share.

Focus on service

Excellent service encourages customers to come back and buy from you again.

Consider developing policies and procedures to promote a customer-focused culture in your business. This could include procedures for greeting and serving customers and resolving customer complaints.

Ask for feedback

Feedback lets customers tell you what they like and dislike about your business, product or service. This gives you valuable insights you can use to improve your offering.

Keep track of customer relationships

As your business grows, so does your customer base. One way to keep track of your customers is by using a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

A CRM collects and manages your interactions with (and information about) customers, suppliers and other businesses. They can help you:

  • record contact information and customer feedback
  • identify and follow up on prospective customers
  • develop personalised communications for different groups of customers
  • analyse which customers engage with callouts, offers or promotions
  • measure the success of your marketing activities
  • track customer behaviour and purchases.

Most importantly, CRM systems keep a history of your interactions with customers. This helps you build and maintain strong, personalised relationships.

Remember that any information you store about your customers needs to follow privacy laws.

Measure customer relationships

Continually evaluate your customer service to see how customers view your business.

You can:

  • ask customers for their thoughts and opinions on your business
  • conduct customer surveys
  • ask customers to leave you an online review
  • check what people are saying about your business online
  • hire mystery shoppers to test your customer service
  • observe interactions between staff and customers.

If possible, record a customer’s feedback against their record in your CRM to understand their individual experience of your business.

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