By Sharon Jones

https://pixabay.com/en/ball-about-customer-buyer-563965/

What is your most valuable relationship in business? Is it the relationship in the workplace? Is it the relationship between employee and employer? Or is it the relationship between the business and the customer? When it comes down to it, it is the customer that has the final say in the success or failure of your business.  They purchase the product or the service from you. It is easy to overlook their importance especially when you're running a business on a small scale. So how can you improve the relationship between your business and the customer? There are many ways that you can do this, and here are some ways to improve and build on the relationships that are making your business thrive or dive.

Improve How They Can Contact The Business

Breaking down walls between the customer and the business is an essential way to increase communication and improvement. Making your methods of contacts as broad as possible, such as email and telephone will help.  Even if it is something as simple as your website being down, having the common courtesy to inform customers of this and keeping them updated on how your company is working to fix the problem helps reinforce the connection between the customer and your business.

Be Attentive To Your Customers

This is the first port of call for building a healthy business-customer relationship.  Look at it from the customer’s perspective. When a customer goes into a shop and looking for help if they don't feel they are being paid attention to, it causes frustration. And when the customer is finally seen to, it can create an unhealthy relationship. Make sure that you are attempting to your customers in every aspect of your relationship whether in person, online or over the phone. A company like Impel Dynamic can help with this approach. Give attention to your customers, and they will give attention to you.

Loyalty Needs To Be Rewarded

If a customer shows loyalty towards you, you need to reward this. As repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers, this is a statistic the cannot be ignored. It is a way of expressing gratitude towards your customer for their loyalty. Customer loyalty is also a good marketing tool because as customers will share their positive experiences online or in person, your business can get more exposure which translates into sales. Therefore your customer network is expanded, and this can translate into more sales for your products and service.

Get Feedback

With the advent of social media, people are able to express their opinions freely and with the touch of a button. It is so easy to express your dislike of a product or service no matter how insignificant it was to your business. And with websites like Yell there is a business in giving poor feedback! So, making sure that you get feedback from the customer directly will go to improve the business relationship. And it will also make the customer feel valued as you are asking them directly for their opinion.