Your relationships with your customers can make or break your business. Build on your customer relationships and you’ll be better placed to take advantage of new ideas, increased sales, and positive word of mouth.
There are a few things you can do to help keep your customers happy.
1. Understand who your customers are
Use any face-to-face time you have with your customers to get to know them better and ask for their opinions and ideas. You can also use surveys to get this feedback. This can help you to get insights and see trends while making your customers feel valued.
If you have a website or active social media platform, use online analytics tools to find out more about your customers including where they live and how they access your site, what time of day they’re active online and what their interests are. This will help you build a customer profile. If you have merchant facilities with CommBank, you can also find out who your most valuable customers are and how demographics and spending habits change over time. Daily IQ is a free business insights tool available in CommBiz and NetBank that can help you access this information.
2. Drive engagement
Use your understanding of your customers to keep them engaged in what you are doing and what you might do next. If you know they usually access your website at night, you can schedule your email newsletters or social media posts to go out then. If you can discover what interests your customers share – maybe cooking or sports – you can create content that is relevant to the things they enjoy.
Over time, this will help them to feel more connected to you. They might want to share how they use your product or what they think you could improve. Consider hosting an event to help get to know your customers as well as deepen the connections between them.
3. Provide extra value
Identify customer needs and how your products or services can help meet these. For example, if your customers tend to be busy parents you may be able to feature how your product or service will help them to save time or money.
4. Personalise
If your customers feel like you understand and appreciate them, they’ll be more likely to keep coming back. Consider building this recognition into your business model. Acknowledge repeat customers, celebrate milestones or create loyalty or rewards programs.
