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Ten Best Tactics For Leveraging Customer Relationships

Guest post by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: Where you are able to manage your business sufficiently effectively, you will have a ready pool of customers, all ready and waiting to serve you...

Ten Best Tactics For Leveraging Customer Relationships

By remembering that your customers, in general, want you to succeed, you will be able to work in partnership with them, helping you to start having fun and creating extra success! Leveraging customer relationships is about creating win-win alliances, so that you both get more! And that's the best of roads to success!

By getting your customer involved in your business they feel a part of the success and enjoy seeing you and your people thrive. And, of course, along the way they get a great deal too.

This is all about believing that you have great customers and a great team of your own people. When you link that together, there are synergistic opportunities to explore.

Research tells us that every customer who receives good service tells 4 others. Every customer who receives bad service tells 12 others.

So by using your people's customer skills, you could be ahead of the game and to understand that, you need to know that the best at getting the most from their customer relationships...

1. Listen Well

They pay great attention to their customers and clients and seek to provide solutions. They build very supportive two-way relationships.

2. Get Over It

And while listening, they listen for fact and leave emotion well out of it. The value is the information and getting all defensive wastes time and energy.

3. Express Joy

When you are really good at this, you will get really excited about bad news. Hearing the bad news is the good news, because failing and unsuccessful organizations aren't even listening!

4. Be Even Nosier!

Whilst they are listening, they are valuing the feedback by asking more - maximizing the opportunity to interact and validating the customer - growing the relationship for the future.

5. Respond

There is little value of hearing about the stuff you need to do differently, if you don't change things. So in responding, great advocates of building and valuing great customer relationships make the difference.

They change things - and take personal feelings out if it. And they tell their customers too. So they will help more and more...and tell their friends too!

6. Invest the Time

Only by being where the customers or clients are accessible will this level of detail be accessible. So those who are exceptional at getting the most back from their customers, get out there.

They spend time getting to know these people who are going to give them so much vital information for the future benefit of their business or organization.

7. It's Not Personal

By being detached from the information they get these folks truly hear what is being said and they say the right things back. They take the 'me' out of it and reflect the issues on their organization.

This decreases the pain and values fact, which is much more useful.

8. Get Ahead

Once these relationships an behaviours become embedded, the places who give the best customer or client service get real smart. They start to ask up front for feedback, by getting their customers to speculate with them.

They may be new product ideas, for example, so they ask what will work and what won't. Now that is leveraging!

9. Energize

Everyone in this team, this department, this organization starts to use these tools - getting great stuff from their customers and create a pot-pourri of thinking.

10. Reward

True relationships with customers are the ultimate win-win and so by involving and using their inputs, give back too! Then there becomes an upward spiral of mutual growth; customer-staff-business; working together.

You need your customers and clients for the business they bring you. They need you for the goods and services you provide for them.

Maybe it's time to raise the bar and make these relationships even more valuable - on both sides of the equation!

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Article Tags: customer relationships, leveraging customer relationships, management development



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