Customer relationships are the foundation to a brand’s popularity. It is crucial for a brand to maintain a solid relationship with their customers so that they stay loyal to the brand. Customers need to be kept engaged with the brand.
Why are Customer Relationships Important?
Retains Customers for the Future
A loyal customer means a happy customer. Happy customers mean a good brand reputation and more traction to new customers. A bad experience is a life-long memory for a customer. It never goes away. Bad experiences lead to a negative reputation online and offline. You want your brand to stay alive as along as possible. That means having a stable relationship with customers. Offering incentives is a big deal to customers. Incentives could be like “Buy 1 Get 1 Free” or “50% off all products”. This will encourage customers to explore your brand more often and more in-depth.
Retains Positive Image Online
According to Forbes, “your online customer service can make or break your business”. Social media is both a blessing and a curse for an organization. It can either ruin the reputation or make it better. Customers are always active on social media. Social media channels are used to write reviews and directly message organization about their queries. When apologizing to a customer online, you need to show emotion in your message so that the customer knows you care as a brand. All brands make mistakes. It’s the actions to resolve the mistake that count.
How Can a Brand Maintain Stable Customer Relationships?
Listen to Your Customers
As cliched as it sounds, “the customer is always right”. Not all customers are brutally honest in person. Most customers are honest through anonymous feedback. According to an article from Indeed.com, “listening to customer feedback is crucial for an organization to succeed”. Customer feedback encourages an organization to do better. Customers appreciate it when their feedback is truly taken seriously. Feedback can be good, bad, neutral and ugly. Organizations can choose to ignore it and move on or take it in their stride and improve.
Exceed Customer Expectations
Indirectly understanding customer expectations will encourage an organization stand out from others. Customers appreciate the element of surprise. For example, a brand could throw a mixer in order to get to know their customer’s better in a slightly subtle manner. It could give the brand an idea of what the customers expect from them and get to know their likes and dislikes of their products.
Reward Your Customers
Loyal customers need to be rewarded from time to time. The most obvious incentive is discounting a high spending customer. Giving out discounts to high spending customers is an overt way to continue to maintain a stable relationship with customers. Another approach to reward customers is to give away free items with a certain amount of purchase. The most used scheme is the “Buy 1 Get 1 Free” method. The thing to be careful with here is to not overuse it. Many brands get overconfident with this scheme and use it a little too often. This will result in losing customers rather than the gaining them. So make sure to plan out your rewards wisely.
Maintaining Customer Relationships with PxidaCX
Maintain a strong and stable relationship with customers gives your brand a good standing in the market. You want your brand to stand out from competition as much as possible. Having a good relationship with customers with upscale your brand each time. New customers mean more popularity of the brand. And new customers bring new perspectives and ideas about how your brand is performing. Continue to gather valuable information and answers from your customers with PxidaCX, our customer satisfaction survey tool. PxidaCX will help you understand what your customers value about your business and what you can continue to do in the future to keep them engaged with your brand.