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You know a bad customer service experience when you face it. You leave a business feeling unsatisfied and unappreciated. Even amongst the confusion, you realize that you never want to shop with that same business again.
Building a working relationship with customers is key to the long-term success of a business.
Having a strong connection based on trust and communication helps customers feel more secured and connected with a brand, and it can also lead to growing customer retention and your repeat purchase rate.
As an entrepreneur, you should learn the importance of customers to your company. They give it a reason and means to exist. This is why you must keep yours happy and maintain them. Regardless of how long you have been in business, you must have heard the phrase “The customer is always right”.
Many establishments have even created a special department in their head office and branches to deal with customer complaints and serve as a link from the management to the customers.
However, there are many more benefits to using the superpowers of relationship marketing. In this article, I’ll share six reasons why your business should focus on building customer relationships,
1. IT REDUCES THE RISK OF LOSING CUSTOMERS
Excellent post-sale customer service is one of the simplest and most-effective approaches to prevent lost customers. It is important to keep your customer fan base strong, and to do this, you must know your customers. Here are 2 helpful tips you can follow to achieve that.
a. Follow-up is checking in after a purchase to see if a customer is satisfied with a product or service experience. The deal isn’t done after you have collected your money. How they feel about your products and services should be your concern too.
b. Following-through means delivering on all promises made to a customer to generate a sale. When you perform follow-up activities, you have a chance to detect potential problems and correct them. Following through increases your credibility and contributes to customer satisfaction.
It is believed that price is one of the reasons why customers will run away from your products. . However, recent studies have shown that prices are only minor reasons customers stopped using a product.
Experts have found poor customer relationships to be one of the major reasons businesses lose customers. As a new business, you need to set up a customer service desk as soon as possible that will be there to satisfy these customers especially after service have been rendered. No business is too small to receive complaints. Humans find fault in everything but with the help, you can reduce these complaints and draw close to perfection.
2. It keeps you high above your competitors.
Having customers is what business is all about. In a competitive environment, having a strong customer relationship could mean the difference between you and your competitors. if your customers are not satisfied with the way they are being treated, they will take their contracts or money to your competitors.
Two people can be in the same market, selling the same product with same price tag, but they will not have same number of customers. Why? Its very simple; Customer service. People will chose and chose again better customer service even over high price. They will prefer to buy from a place where their voices are heard and their opinions matter.
This keeps Your Customers to you and will keep you far above your competition.
If you neglect this slight move because a few customers switched ships, then you might be humbled when half of your customers do the same. You have to take the departure of even one customer very seriously.
3. IT INFLUENCES REPURCHASE AND LOYALTY FUNCTION
Reichheld & Teal (2001) defines “customer retention as more than giving the customer what they expect, it’s about exceeding their expectations so that they become loyal advocates for your brand.”
Most businesses over the years have failed to maintain the relationships they have built. Replacing almost half their customers, sabotage half of their partnerships and work off a quarter of their employees before a fiscal year runs it’s a course.
This adversely affects their marketing strategies causing them to have no “real” growth and spend time/efforts/resources creating that initial connection they once had. The long-term relationship value should never be underestimated in doubling customer database
Building a good customer relationship gives you an assurance of repurchase and loyalty from your customers. A happy customer will always come back for one thing or the other, but an unhappy customer will try someone else when he needs assistance in the future.
If you take your customer service seriously you will end up with the most loyal customers in the market. If you are a sole proprietor, make sure to interact with your customers when they come to make a purchase.
Ask them how their day went, tell them about any added exclusive incentives that you might be offering to them, everybody likes the word free, no matter how small it is. Stand as a friend if need be.
4. IT IS LESS EXPENSIVE TO RETAIN OLD CUSTOMERS THAN LOOK FOR NEW ONES
This is very true indeed. Statistics prove that it is six times less expensive retaining customers than acquiring new ones. Imagine the cost of TV Ads, Radio Ads, and newspaper Ads plus Social media promotions.
It takes a lot of time, money and energy to convince one person to buy from you but it will take less to convince a regular customer to do so. Already he or she has come to trust your products and was satisfied with your service, so it will cost you almost nothing to get them buy from you plus they are your best tool of advertising.
5. IT INCREASES REVENUE FROM A SINGLE CUSTOMER
Building and maintaining good customer relationships can help to increase the revenue you can generate from a single customer. For instance, when you go to purchase a phone from a gadget store and you got free earphone, some candies and wonderful customer service altogether, how would you feel? 
Now tell me, if your charger should get spoilt after a while, where are you going to purchase another charger, that previous store right? Yes!
That is how good customer service can help your business. It can increase the amount of revenue you generate from a satisfied customer. As long as you are honest, calm, friendly and approachable while selling a product or delivering a service, your customer is surely going to come back again.
Imagine If other customers act like this….
6. IT PREVENTS YOUNG BUSINESS FAILURE
According to experts, one of the major reasons why young businesses fail is because they often neglect customer service. It is important to note that customers are already used to the popular brands that meet their needs. You will need to have an ace up your sleeves to bring in your own product.Good customer service can be the ace up your sleeve.
It is very likely that due to the popularity a brand has acquired over the years, they will hardly have time to satisfy customers properly, and that is where your business comes in.
You should leverage on customer service and the same product at the same price. They will see no need of patronising those big brands because, with you their voices are heard and their opinions matter plus your product is same, if not better than the big brands. This is a sweet deal that any customer would love.
CONCLUSION
A satisfied customer is surely going to tell other people about your business, and the satisfaction he got from it. For this reason alone, you will get more profits in the future.
ACCORDING TO EXPERTS, IN A SITUATION WHERE YOU HAVE A COMPETITOR WITH SIMILAR PRODUCTS OR SERVICES, CUSTOMERS WILL MOST LIKELY GO FOR THE ONE WITH BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE.
