Businesses need to constantly keep up with the ever-changing demands of customers. Five experts discuss how to improve customer relations, starting below with Jean-Michel Moutot, a Professor at Audencia Business School:
No company today can afford to ignore the quality of its customer relations. There are many reasons for this, both technical and economic.
Technology is obviously at the top of the list of the most critical factors. The gradual extension of digital technology to all areas of economic activity has not spared the customer relations sector over the last 20 years. Static customer databases quickly gave way to CRM systems in the 90s. These were backed up by extranet solutions. It took a second generation of CRM solutions, led by Salesforce, for multichannel to give way to omnichannel.
The priority from then on was to bring all customer contact points into line with each other. In fact, the proliferation of digital customer access channels has led, and largely continues to lead, to numerous malfunctions, with customers getting lost in the channels. The first lever for improving customer relations has very little to do with strategy. It is both modest in scope and increasingly complex: bringing the company’s various customer channels into harmony.
Next there is the question of customer maturity. The now almost unlimited access to information via digital technology has profoundly transformed the customer we meet on a daily basis. Twenty years ago, customers generally knew very little when they first contacted the company. In B2B, this meant that a healthy relationship could be built through education. By educating customers with what they needed to know, the company could build a caring relationship over time. This is now only marginally possible and not very predictable.
Indeed, any two initial sales contacts may successively reveal first an ‘old-fashioned’ customer, i.e. with little technical knowledge of the offering, and then an expert who has spent days on the Internet to understand the technique and specify his needs very precisely – right from the first contact. The company needs to be extremely flexible to be able to put either an expert in front of these two customers from the very first contact, or someone with a lower level of skill and therefore at a lower cost.
The second lever is therefore new hybrid sales organisation models. These models will be based on digital solutions incorporating AI, enabling as many customer requests as possible to be resolved, leaving the best salespeople to respond in real-time to expert customers. However, these models are not stable over time, as they are highly dependent on market maturity and competitive intensity. We need to rewrite the relevant organisational models in this new environment.
Customer psychology has changed considerably over the last two decades. At the same time, the proliferation of digital channels has created an expectation of greater warmth in the relationship. While digital technology has enabled a quantum leap in the functional improvement of the customer relationship, emotion and feeling have been side-lined. This will undoubtedly be the challenge for the period ahead: how to continue to make functional progress in customer relations while recreating the emotional bond that is so important for a lasting relationship.
Barry D’Arcy, VP of Partners, Storyblok:
The key to customer and partner relations is listening and understanding clients’ needs.
From our experience at Storyblok, partnerships are like a lever: the more partnerships we grow, the more heavy lifting we can do. They allow us to focus on what we do best and rely on our partners for the rest. And this can apply to any business because the main rule of a successful business is that you cannot be everything to everyone. Therefore, we have to focus on our core business and use partnerships to leverage what’s missing.
Being in a partnership can help partners get in touch with the right leads by leveraging each other’s networks. Each partner has a close relationship with their clients, which means their clients will trust them when making a recommendation. Trust doesn’t just happen overnight though – the key here is listening and understanding what clients need. If a prospect didn’t have a problem they were trying to solve, they wouldn’t be in the market for a new product. It sounds obvious, but in order to help the customer understand why your product is the solution to their problem, you have to understand and be able to clearly articulate why your product is the solution to their problem. This is a critical principle in how Storyblok delivers sales enablement to its agency partners.
An added bonus is that being part of a partnership or an ecosystem becomes an invaluable source of feedback on your product. If you are part of a technology partner programme that is focused solely on selling, you are unlikely to get that kind of feedback. Again, this is where listening and relationships come to help and add so much more value.
Lots of data in the market points out an estimated 40-50% increase in customer win rate for deals with partners involved. We have also seen that partnerships tend to lead to bigger deals due to trust and collaboration. When partners approach potential clients together, they tend to drive higher ROI for every deal.
In times of a challenging economy, businesses need to use most of their resources on riding the storm out and focusing on their core competencies. When there are great partnerships in place, this can be done much easier. If a need arises, there is likely a partner that can help with it. This is mostly true for partners that complement each other’s offerings.
Drawing from our experience running our own Partner Programme, we are noticing that there is decision exhaustion among end-users when it comes to choosing multiple tech solutions. As part of the MACH Alliance, we want to contribute to reducing the friction around product selection. And the best way to do that is to educate, not to recommend and sell. Having all the knowledge in front of them, end-users will be able to make quicker and informed decisions about their tech stack needs.
Fiona Wylie, Founder, Brand Champions:
Customer relations is how a business connects with its clients, from the first hello to ongoing support. This first meeting is essential for business success because it shapes how customers see and engage with a company. It involves providing reliable service, reaching out to customers and using strategies to build trust and satisfaction, which leads to long-term relationships and business growth.
Did you know that 80% of customers say the CX a company provides is just as important as the products and services they sell? (Salesforce, 2023).
When improving your customer relations, you should focus on five core aspects. They are: effective communication, providing support, personalising customer interactions, gaining feedback and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Effective communication
Maintaining consistent communication across various channels, such as phone, email and social media, is crucial for showing customers you are reliable and attentive. This could range from engagement on social media to answering DMs and having a quick email response rate. This approach helps build solid, trust-filled relationships by making customers feel understood and appreciated. It’s about ensuring they know you’re there for them, ready to listen and respond, regardless of the platform and using the platforms they best like to communicate through.
Providing support
Timely and efficient support is essential. By fine-tuning your support channels to handle issues quickly, you can turn a bad customer experience into a good one. Being there when your customers need you most ensures they feel supported and valued. Implement customer support systems within your business so your team can access how to help at all times, have commonly asked questions and know what to do in different scenarios.
Personalising customer interactions
Personalising customer interactions starts by collecting data on their preferences and past behaviour. Using this information to tailor experiences enhances engagement and satisfaction, making each interaction feel uniquely tailored to the individual.
For example, a restaurant might use a regular customer’s order history to send personalised offers, like a discount on their favourite dish or an invitation to try a new menu item similar to their preferences, directly through a text or email.
Gaining feedback and enhancing customer satisfaction
Trust Pilot, Google reviews, etc.; you need to encourage feedback! It is crucial to actively seek and thoughtfully respond to customer feedback.
Using surveys and direct feedback helps you gauge how happy your customers are. This feedback is crucial for fine-tuning your offerings to meet their needs and expectations better. For example, if multiple customers suggest extended weekend hours in their feedback, considering this change could significantly boost satisfaction and business volume.
This is just the beginning of your customer relations strategy. Diving deep into each area and prioritising your customer leads to success.
Paul Ducie, Partner,Oliver Wight:
To improve your customers’ relationship with your business, it’s not about rushing out a charm offensive or rebranding, it is about hard and systematic effort to ensure every customer’s experience is consistently high, especially for the things that matter to them (not you).
First ask yourself the difficult questions on how you’re managing customer relations, and the most fundamental is: “Do they feel like a valued customer, and how do we know?” Is your business prepared to act on their feedback to improve customer relations: many are surprisingly unwilling to change!
You really need to understand your customer priorities to ensure you understand what they value: do you ask them? We’re in a world of consistent change – are the priorities of your customers today the same or different to a year or two ago?
Strong customer relationships are built on trust, and trust grows from actions – does your business consistently do what you say you will do? Are your processes, systems and behaviours providing effective transparency, integration and insight on where you succeed and fail with delivering your promise? If you don’t know where you are falling short, how will you ever improve things?
Are you delivering excellent customer service today? Probably not if you have not understood and aligned with your customers on how to best measure your performance to them? For this you need transparency and integration across your value chain so you know how your processes, systems and behaviours are contributing to customer service levels, both positively and negatively?
Controlling costs is important for every business, and you need to understand not just what will drive internal efficiency, but also the impact of price and quality changes on your customer relationships.
Whether you are a retailer with many customers or a specialist business with just a few, you need to ask yourself if you understand both the impact of short-term variability in your service level on them and what your customers will need from you over the longer term. Are you willing to be open and honest about your capability over time to deliver this, and are you identifying and mitigating risks that would negatively impact the customer relationship?
You also need to be clear on whether you want a partnership or a transactional relationship. Both can work, but many businesses kid themselves they have a close relationship with customers and then behave like the latter. If you want a close relationship with your customers, you need to ask yourself: “At what level are you prepared to integrate knowledge and/or processes and/or systems to achieve a much better view of the customer throughout the business?”
It’s a lot of questions, and probably a lot of work. Are you prepared to invest in your people, systems and data to improve customer experience? You will need to be if you are serious about making an improvement across your business.
Andrew Stevens, Principal, Banking and Financial Services, Quadient:
Building strong customer relationships should start and end with communication. However, businesses in all industries often fall into the trap of confusing or even alienating customers with unclear and inconsistent information. This can range from sending conflicting messages over multiple channels like mobile devices and emails, to ambiguous wording.
Good customer relations are more than just a ‘nice to have’ in 2024. Regulators can now fine companies for not communicating with customers clearly. The FCA introduced the New Consumer Duty last year, which obliges banks to deliver complex financial information in a comprehensible way. Customers not being able to understand financial information can have more serious consequences than just damaging customer relations, it can lead to charges for unarranged overdrafts or missed tax deadlines. Worryingly, research by Quadient found that when tested only 8% of UK consumers could correctly identify the true cost to them when presented with a summary of overdraft charges. This was despite 39% claiming a high level of financial knowledge.
But with tools now available to take advantage of the abundance of customer data, the ability to know what messages to communicate, over which channel, at what time, is well within reach. A personalised and digitised approach to CXM is essential to attract, retain and develop a good relationship with customers. By segmenting customers into groups based on internal data, businesses can identify the different levels of support customers may need. For example, the government may impose a hose pipe ban due to water shortages in the summer months. Water companies should therefore proactively advise customers on how to adhere to the ban to avoid fines.
Businesses also need to consider the volume of channels now available, from wearable devices to an ever-growing social media ecosystem. Companies should embrace all communication channels equally, rather than avoiding them due to siloed, channel specific products. These solutions fail to provide the level of personalisation required and create large costs whenever changes are needed. A single solution that can handle every channel will simplify communications by unifying data from both modern and legacy data sources to give employees a comprehensive view of customer preferences. This data can then be used to create a digital map of the customer’s journey, which documents past interactions and avoids the growing epidemic of nuisance communications.
Organisations need to ask themselves the right questions when contacting customers – are my communications personalised? Am I using the right channel to communicate with this customer? Are my messages clear? To improve customer relations, businesses need to focus on providing proactive support, delivered in an informative manner while leveraging data to help inform their communications strategy. By adopting this customer-centric approach to relationships, businesses can boost profitability through building long-lasting and value-based relationships with customers old and new.