Building long-term relationships with your customers is crucial to any business’s survival. Not only will these relationships ensure ongoing success, they will also provide stability within your business, which is key to longevity.
Crucially, a business is only as good as its clients, and as such developing these relationships needs to be top of your agenda.
Here we share our top tips for both developing and keeping important working relationships:
- Be trustworthy: It goes without saying, but trust in any relationships is key. When customers trust in you and your business, they’ll keep using your services again and again, as well as recommending you to others. No long-term relationship can survive without trust as a foundation, so ensuring that you’re consistently honest and transparent will go a long way to helping you cultivate the type of relationships with your customers that your business depends on.
- Understand your clients’ needs and business: Knowing your customers business and needs as well (if not better), than your own is imperative to success. By knowing fully what a client wants from you, you’ll be able to service their needs in a way that adds real value to their business, which is the name of the game when it comes to building and keeping excellent customer relationships.
- Communication: As with trust, communication is key to keeping a working relationship alive and thriving. Make sure that the lines of communication are always open between you and your customers, allowing them to constantly feed back to you on any concerns, changes or requests. Constantly communicating with your customers will help with building trust, as well as improving overall customer satisfaction.
- Provide value: Customers will always be looking to see if you are providing value to both them and their business. It’s therefore crucial to always be adding value to clients, whether this is through offering additional services, or other things that you recognise are going to help them out. It’s important to look at each client individually to determine what will be valuable to them and deliver on this to create strong relationships.
- Continuously improve customer experience: To do this, ask for feedback, and implement changes based off of this feedback. As your customers, they really know what you need to be doing to improve. By continuously striving to improve the customer experience, clients will feel valued and heard, in turn cultivating the longer-term relationships you want for your business.
Paul Smith, Co-founder, Citrus
