How to make your customers feel valued

Personal relationships are two-way streets; the key to their strength and longevity lies in the hands of both parties. However, the same isn't true of business relationships—especially those between vendors and customers. In this case, the onus on maintaining the relationship is more on the vendor than on the customer.

Most of the time, customers have several options to choose from. The very fact that they chose your product or service means that they saw some value in it and in you. Naturally, it's important that you reciprocate in order to strengthen the bond further. In other words, if you show your customers that you value them, you'll be able to turn their positive feeling towards you into lasting loyalty. (There's also another remarkable benefit you stand to gain by doing this, but we'll get to it at the end.)

Here are a few ways how you can accomplish this.

#1 - Listen to customers and implement their feedback

In the usual sales cycle, it's a given that you often talk to prospects before they purchase your offering. And it's also natural that the conversations fade out and become almost non-existent once the sale is closed. Closure of a sale, however, need not mean the end of conversations. Well, they don't have to be as frequent as before, but they certainly don't have to stop fully either. What you can do is steer them in a new direction altogether.

Before the sale, tell customers what your offering can do for them.

After the sale, find out what more your offering can do for them.

While the regular route of calls and emails works well for conversations with individual customers, surveys are a great way to interact with your wider customer base. Using surveys, you can gauge overall customer satisfaction levels and also identify areas of improvement.

Here are some best practices:

• Be appreciative - After gleaning insight from survey responses, make sure to tell your customers that their participation is appreciated and share what exactly your next steps are going to be. This assures your customers that their voice was heard.
• Reach out regularly - Don't let surveys be a one-time activity. Conduct them regularly—annually or bi-annually. With enough time and consistency, they could turn into something your customers actually look forward to.

#2 - Handle support requests promptly

Acquiring customers is certainly a win, but retaining them is what success truly means in the long run. The first and most important key to retaining customers is providing effective and prompt support. When a customer reports an issue and you respond promptly and resolve it as quickly as possible, they carry with them a positive support experience. The customer feels heard and that their concern was taken seriously. Such experiences make them feel valued and sow the seeds for customer loyalty.

Make sure to streamline your customer support function and try to resolve issues as quickly and satisfactorily as possible. Invest in a good help desk software that supports multiple channels, provides self-service capabilities to customers, and automation functionalities that ease the burden on your support agents. Making it easy for your customers to find solutions by themselves is another way to show them that you value them and their time.

Here are some best practices:

• Use automation - Automate mundane tasks as much as possible so that your agents have more time to spend on critical issues.
• Don't overuse automation - Maintain a healthy balance between human intervention and technological implements like AI. Put in more time and thought while setting up chatbots because even a poorly designed bot could lead to a bad support experience.

#3 - Remember anniversaries and special dates

Personal relationships and business relationships may not be completely alike, but there are a few traits of the former that apply to the latter—like remembering anniversaries and special dates. For starters, you can note the date on which you closed a deal and fix it as the date your relationship with the customer officially started. You can then get in touch with them on the same date every year and find out how their journey that year went.

Additionally, you can go the good old-fashioned route and send physical greeting cards on festivals and holidays. This presents a welcome change from virtual greetings and wishes, which have become the norm today.

Here are some best practices:

• Come prepared - Make sure to gather context before making an anniversary call. Check whether the customer raised any support requests the past year and find out how they were resolved. This knowledge will help you set the tone for the conversation ahead and also prepare you for any uncomfortable questions.
• Be flexible - Give customers the choice to opt out of receiving such communication, if need be. There's a thin line between making customers feel valued and being intrusive.

#4 - Talk about them wherever possible

Another aspect of personal relationships that you can apply to business relationships is the positivity of telling the world that you're together (with their consent, of course). And the easiest way to do this is through customer case studies. Though case studies exist primarily to explain the practical benefits of your offerings, they also act as a form of indirect advertisements to the customers themselves. They become more valuable if the customer happens to be an SMB that could do well with a bit more visibility.

This extends to conversations in the real world, too. If you have a customer's consent to publicize their journey with you, feel free to share those details with prospective customers when the opportunity arises. By doing this, you can talk about what your offering can help them achieve and also shed light on the other customer's business—more or less a word-of-mouth referral.

Here are some best practices:

• Get consent - Never create or start sharing a case study without receiving formal consent from the customer. Failing to do so could even invite legal trouble.
• Collaborate - Make sure to find out the exact details that the customer is fine with sharing and the ones that they don't want to be included. Have a structured approval process in place for case studies.

Well, what's the other remarkable benefit that we mentioned earlier in the article?

It's simply the fact that when customers feel valued, they speak about their experience to others and inspire them to try your offering. From good ol' word-of-mouth marketing to shout-outs on social media, customer advocacy comes in various forms when a customer feels valued and has consistently positive experiences with a business. Ultimately, no matter how much a business talks about itself, hearing positive words from customers themselves is something else, isn't it?

Now, what other things can organizations do to make customers feel valued? Please feel free to share them in the comments so we can all learn together!