Your customers aren’t just endless supplies of money looking to pad your profit margin. They’re people. And people value relationships and trust. Having good customer relationships is the key to making customers come back.
In the end, it’s cheaper to keep existing customers than secure new ones. That’s why building good customer relationships is so important.
Here are five online tools that can help you improve your company’s relationship with its customers.
1. A Company Blog
A regularly-updated company blog is about more than creating “fresh” content for SEO. It can also serve as a first line of communication between your company and your customers.
For example, you might use your company blog to keep customers updated about:
- new product release schedules;
- ongoing maintenance or troubleshooting issues that might affect them;
- special promotions such as sales or contests;
- industry events you’ll participate in, like conferences or conventions;
- good work your company is doing related to causes your customers care about.
Your company blog is also a place where customers can contact you in your comments section, giving you a chance to gather feedback from them and answer their questions directly.
2. Social Media Accounts
You can use social media accounts similarly to your company blog when it comes to the types of updates you might post. But they’re especially good for publishing “soundbites,” statistics, and short quotes that are likely to grab attention and be shared.
Again, social media allows customers to interact with you. That means you can see their concerns in addition to what they love about you. And you have an opportunity to help and answer questions.
3. An Email List
One of the most direct ways you can interact with customers is to create an email list and send regular email newsletters. This allows you to put promotional material right in your customers’ inboxes. But it also adds a more personal touch to those relationships.
Not only can you tailor email campaigns to address your customers by name (if you’ve collected that data), but you can segment audiences in most email marketing services, such as GetResponse. Then you can use automation to send highly-targeted campaigns to groups based on their actions or intentions rather than sending more generic messages to all customers.
4. Support Forums
If your company offers any kind of tech-related product or service, support forums are great relationship-building tools.
Forums not only let customers ask questions and report problems to you, but they also let them interact with each other. This helps build an active and invested community around your company or brand.
5. Live Chat
Live chat software is another option when you want to make your staff available to help customers in need. These generally work as floating or pop-up interactive elements on your website.
While live chat tools like Zendesk Chat are often used for tech support, you don’t have to limit them to that. Focus on the full customer relationship by integrating pre-sales chats or to answer frequently asked questions with the help of a chatbot when staff isn’t available.
In the end, building better customer relationships is about listening, learning, and helping customers so they trust your company and want to continue doing business with you. These tools are just some of the options you have for doing this.
