Developing long-term customer relationships

We recently touched on the value of welcoming new customers to your business with a timely, impactful welcome call, sowing the seeds for the start of a fruitful relationship. But once you have your customers on board, how do you ensure their experience remains smooth or, more importantly, that they continue to trust you over your competitors?

Customer centricity

The foundation of any customer relationship comes down to how well you understand your customer’s needs. For a business to truly and consistently succeed in developing and maintaining long-term relationships, a customer-centric approach should be a key part of organisational culture and values from the beginning.

Striking the right tone

As we’ve highlighted before, all customers, whether for business or consumer purposes, are human – which sounds obvious, we know, but ultimately, we are all individual. Therefore, the way we make decisions and like to communicate will vary from one another. Hand in hand with customer centricity should be an emphasis on flexible and authentic communications, ideally incorporating a human touch alongside digitally driven communications to create a really personal and meaningful connection.

Whether through in-house staff or an outsourced team of telemarketing professionals, each human touchpoint has the opportunity to make a real impact. A one to one conversation enables you to build rapport, tailor the conversation to the interests of each individual and glean insights to feed the relevance of future communications.

Seamless experiences at all points of contact

If one of your sales team has worked hard to build rapport with a customer, who then speaks with a colleague with no knowledge of their journey so far, that customer will receive a significantly disconnected experience that might skew their overall opinion of your brand.

Consistency is key when it comes to maintaining good relationships with customers, so ensuring an integrated approach to communications and customer service is integral for this to succeed. Having robust processes such as CRM integration in place will help to maximise your team’s responsiveness and enable conversations to be picked up seamlessly, contributing to a more human presence behind your brand and reinforcing its reputation.

Building relationships over time

As with any kind of relationship, it cannot succeed in the long-term if effort to build up a good rapport is only made in the first stages of the customer journey and left to fizzle out. Your repeat customers will drive greater revenue over time than new business, so it’s important to build on your customer knowledge to understand gaps and identify additional opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.

Additionally, telephone surveying not only provides insight into your customers’ interests, it is an effective way to find out how customers feel about their experience, where improvements could be made and where your company excels. Voice contact provides a valuable opportunity to understand what drives your customers emotionally and gain a deeper understanding of their experience through tone and verbal cues.

Feedback is imperative in demonstrating your company’s customer centric values because it is measurable and actionable, showing that you have listened to what your customers have to say and have acted upon their feedback to address issues.

At The Telemarketing Company, our team is experienced in engaging with decision makers at all levels across a wide range of industries and sectors, building rapport and tailoring their approach to make a genuine connection on behalf of your brand.

If you would like to discuss how we can bring a powerful human touch to your customer interactions, to build trust and loyalty and a truly customer-centric approach, get in touch today.