Big businesses often face big challenges when it comes to catering to their customers. They want to deliver the same, hands-on, personal service that SMEs pride themselves on, and that customers enjoy. However, when you’re a large-scale operation spanning across the world, things can become increasingly difficult.
So, how do you create long lasting and personal relationships with your customers?
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The answer, in an increasingly digital age, is through technology. The latest technological innovations help big businesses to remove the barriers between the customers and themselves. New technology allows huge corporations to be personal and proactive and avoid being a cold and faceless presence.
Listening is Key
The first step that any business can take towards creating a more personal relationship with their customers is to listen to what they have to say. Whether it’s listening to emails sent from customers, or hearing how they interact with your brand via social media channels, there are plenty of ways to better understand how your customers’ needs. Listening to these needs is of the utmost importance when it comes to creating long-lasting relationships, and new technology has provided a variety of platforms for this.
Today, consumers are connecting with companies on whatever device or screen they happen to be using at the time, a process that research firm Forrester calls ‘agile commerce‘. Agile commerce requires an equally agile customer service policy that encompasses all of the touchpoints customers use.
Analyse Customer Interactions
Offering various platforms to listen to customer needs is seemingly useless if they aren’t used to their full potential. It can be difficult to sift through all of the material and devise a plan of attack.
One company has even developed software they call, text analytics, to help businesses understand the wants and needs of consumers. Text analytics helps to analyze customer voice, tone, sentiment, and overall reading-between-the-lines of customer interactions with a brand. Businesses are using this in order to create a more personal interaction with their customers and also to understand what topics are frequently flagged up by customers.
Act on your Knowledge
By identifying and solving problems that customers may have, a brand will be able to better satisfy their customers. If their questions are not answered, consumers are left angry and agitated. However, as the business experts at The Marketing Donut state, complaining customers can end up becoming a business’ biggest fans if their matters are handled swiftly and professionally.
This information, whether it comes from social media or survey responses, for example, can be used proactively to establish an effective tone of voice, allowing companies to speak to their customers in a language they appreciate. Companies need to know what their customers want, when they want it and how they want it to be delivered. By listening and understanding what customers want, brands should be able to act with some level of certainty, with a strategy backed by relevant data.
Forming personal relationships with customers is an ongoing process. Companies need to continue to collect relevant information from their target audience and regularly analyze this information to detect and deal with trends that emerge. From doing so, trustworthy and personal relationships are built and have a proper foundation to stand upon.
