Building relationships with your customers
Thursday 19th March 2009
Last article I spoke about standing out from the crowd and making sure you are talked about.
Your most successful relationships are likely to be built by word-of-mouth referrals. While search engines, advertising and press will bring traffic to your site, there is often nothing better than having a customer sing your praises to their friends and colleagues. Be careful though, this is a two-edged sword as for every customer that feels you have delivered an exemplary service, they will tell (on average) two people about it, for every customer that feels that you have provided them with an unsatisfactory service, they are likely to tell around ten people how they've been treated, so maintaining a professional level of service at all times is an ideal that everyone in your business should understand.
Never underestimate the power of speaking directly with your customers, where possible see if you can maintain open and regular discussions with them as they may well have other tasks, ideas and suggestions that you may be able to help them with. Encourage your staff (where appropriate) to spend a little extra time getting to know as many of your customers as possible. The discussions will often provide the opportunity for the savvy to either strengthen and improve your core product(s) or to make changes which will give benefits to others, you may even be lucky enough to find an entire new business venture! We have our own example of this that can be seen in the recent addition of new add-ons to the OpenCrypt system, which have all been direct results of meeting the needs of our customers own businesses.
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Article written by, Oliver Stockman, Head of Marketing for ionix Limited.
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