No matter what industry your business is in, and regardless of the size of your business, customer loyalty often drives the success of your business. If you don’t have loyal customers, it’s difficult to have a successful business. Many customers will stop doing business with a company simply due to a bad customer experience. Rather than focusing on sales and revenue, the highest quality customers require valuable relationships.
Nurturing your customers from the initial contact is the most effective way to turn them into long-term, loyal customers. From small startups to international corporations, here’s why fostering relationships with your customers is a better way to create long-term, quality customer loyalty.
Customer Experience Matters
86% of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience. While plenty of consumers often look for the lowest price available, it’s clear that modern consumers value a great experience. When thinking about growing revenue, focusing on building real relationships with your customers has a much greater return on your investment of time than focusing on new sales tactics.
If your business goal is to improve your customers’ experience, you’re not alone. Customer experience is a top priority for most businesses, and for good reason. With competition around every corner, customers have the luxury to shop around for the best experience, and you can be sure that they do just that.
Maintain Your Value
One of the most important components of building a solid relationship with your customers is to maintain your value after the initial commitment from your customer. All too often, businesses maintain their value for a short time period after the initial sale, and lose the customer after quality and service decline.
Show your customers that you appreciate their business and their loyalty. Where so many companies offer discounts and promotions for new customers, the long-time customer often feels neglected. Remind your customers of the valuable relationship they have with your company.
Anticipate and React to Customer Needs
Customer engagement is vital in anticipating and reacting your customer needs. If you’re not actively engaged with your customers face to face or digitally through social media, you won’t be able to react to concerns and feedback.
Focus groups, consumer surveys, panels, and dedicated feedback sessions are just a few of the tools that you can use to analyze consumer trends in your market. Using this data to proactively address changes in your consumer base strategically positions your business to succeed.
Interact with Loyal Customers
Even if your business doesn’t have the budget for a dedicated customer engagement or social media team, there are plenty of ways that you can interact with your loyal customers on a regular basis. Today’s technology makes it easier than ever to foster meaningful relationships with your high-value customers and clients.
As we mentioned, social media engagement is a valuable tool to create meaningful engagement with your customers. Take that interaction a step further by hosting face to face events with your top clients. Invitation-only events let your customers know that you value their business, their loyalty, and the relationship they’ve maintained with your business.
Be Receptive and Responsive to Feedback
Agile businesses quickly respond to negative feedback and work with customers directly to resolve issues. Businesses that want to develop long-term relationships with customers regularly welcome feedback. Without feedback, businesses can’t grow, adapt, and develop into the business their customers need.
Whether you collect and respond to feedback through your customer service team, or you reach out to customers and clients directly to collect feedback, it’s an important step for any business to take in order to grow and create customer loyalty.
Don’t Neglect Your Smallest Customers
These tips shouldn’t only be used on your biggest, most profitable customers. You should use these tips on all of your customers, regardless of their size or revenue generation. The key to building relationships and growing your business is to make these behaviors a foundational part of your business.
Before you even speak with a prospective client, shift from thinking about a sales meeting as a sales pitch. Think of it as the start of a long-lasting, valuable relationship.
Use TechTrack to Build Relationships
At TechTrack, we know just what it takes to build a lasting relationship with clients. To help streamline your client-acquisition process, we’ve developed a robust database that makes tracking companies, investors, transactions, and service providers easier than ever.
For more information on how TechTrack can help transform your business, give us a call today.
About TechTrack
TechTrack provides unlimited access to world-class data and prospecting tools to growth-oriented organizations without the high fees, long term commitments and up-selling associated with other platforms. With daily updates by a dedicated team of analysts to a database that is researched and verified internally, TechTrack offers users a unique perspective and interface that is designed to provide insight and value to customers of all types in the knowledge economy.
Get started today and supercharge your pipeline.
