Building a rapport with your customers helps reduce churn. A strong client-business relationship increases brand trust and customer lifetime value for businesses selling memberships, subscriptions, services, or products.
Effective client management lets you understand your customer needs on both macro and micro levels. It helps you create a company culture that offers the highest levels of customer service and engagement to current and prospective clients.
However, most businesses fail to invest in customer service enhancement to improve client relationships. 72% of consumers switch brands after one poor experience with your business. Hence, you should take CX and client relationships seriously.
Let’s understand the five smart ways to take your customer relationship management to the next level.
Create Customer-Loyalty Programs to Strengthen Retention
People love unique loyalty programs and spend more when they are a part of it. Reward programs increase client retention. Boosting client retention by just 5% can raise profits by 25% to 95%.
Well-designed and value-based loyalty programs nurture existing clientele and have a direct impact on sales. Customers want rewards, deals, discounts, and free products from loyalty programs.
There are different types of loyalty programs that you can pick for your business. For example, earn and burn programs help clients earn virtual rewards. Similarly, gamified loyalty programs offer challenges and badges to customers.
You can also leverage hybrid programs that combine several program structures together and umbrella loyalty programs where customers can use the rewards they earn at one business to get free products from another brand.
Solve Customer Issues and Complaints On Priority
Many customers remain dissatisfied if their issues are not solved on priority. If your clients face continued struggle, your business will face a disconnect between your brand and their needs.
You should identify why your customers are unhappy and what the reasons for frustration are. Based on your client’s exact needs, you should create a knowledge base and use a ticketing system to organize and prioritize customer issues systematically. AI-powered systems work as a centralized platform for managing customer issues, questions, and requests.
Avoid manually tracking complaints and invest in AI-powered ticketing tools to prioritize issues. A well-structured complaint categorization helps support teams tackle critical issues first while addressing less urgent ones in a timely manner.
With the help of a high-class ticketing program, you can offer priority support on channels like email, social, community forums, and others. You can also ask your support team to use the software as it gives them the flexibility to deliver high-quality support.
Offer Personalized Experiences To Every Customer
Generic service no longer works. You should offer tailored customer experiences by sending them specialized offers and recommendations depending on their customer journey stage. Your recommendation should be unique for each person based on their past buying history and persona.
Personalized CX based on customer personas captures different buyer needs. You should use AI-driven tools and CRM software to ensure proper audience segmentation and quality in data processing. Personalized, relevant, and omnichannel content for every touchpoint should be shared across each digital channel for maximum effectiveness.
You should also opt for micro-segmentation to reach individual customers along with audience segments. Customers prefer a conversational approach to engagement. Hence, you should ensure that you have one-on-one interactions with your clients whenever possible to ensure their experience remains at the top.
Build Trust Through Transparency and Ethical Practices
Ethical marketing practices build transparency. From having transparent pricing and refund policies to honest reviews, brands should base customer relationships on trust and integrity.
You should also offer proactive customer service by letting your customers know immediately if there is any issue with the product delivery. In this way, you can avoid complaints and take full responsibility. When consumers remain informed at each stage of the product or service delivery, they are more likely to stick to the brand.
You also need to show that your business operates ethically and cares more than just profits. Your business should be accountable for sustainability, fair wages, and ethical sourcing. If you claim to be eco-friendly or socially responsible, it is a green flag that will work in your company’s favor. However, you should play marketing gimmicks without actually getting involved in real social impact initiatives. Doing so might harm your brand reputation.
Treat customers with respect, give them honest and unbiased information, and run your business with integrity. People want to support brands that care about the environment and practice responsible behaviors by maintaining harmony and peace across all communities.
Improve Your Service and Drive Product Innovation Using Customer Feedback
There is a direct link between consumer feedback and product innovation. 70% of businesses leverage AI to improve customer satisfaction. You should request product feedback and build features that matter the most to your users.
Besides having a user-centric design, your product should uncover opportunities for product improvement by listening to your user’s needs. Implementing a customer feedback loop that constantly enhances your product using consumer opinions is a champion strategy to follow.
Implement customer feedback management to collect and analyze reviews and responses from your consumers. Your collected feedback should lead to actionable change. For example, if your survey reveals that your product UX is confusing, you should immediately fix the UX/UI interface.
You need to make feedback easy to give. If customers have to go through a complicated process just to share their thoughts, they will not bother. Offer multiple channels, such as email, social media, live chat, or even SMS, so they can communicate in whatever way is most convenient for them.
But collecting feedback is not enough; you have to act on it. If you keep hearing complaints about slow customer support, fix it. If people love a certain product feature, find ways to enhance it. Customers notice when businesses make changes based on their suggestions, and it makes them feel valued. On the other hand, if you repeatedly ignore feedback, they will assume their opinions do not matter and take their business elsewhere.
