Establishing stronger connections with your customers is essential for creating a positive customer experience (CX) and building long-term relationships.

By understanding your customers' needs and pain points, you can provide better solutions and improve their overall experience with your brand. This, in turn, can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

When did you last contact your key customers or suppliers to thank them for their business, understand their needs or ask how you can improve?

Keeping in touch with your key customers is essential for several reasons.

Here are some of the most important ones:

1. Customer Retention:

   By maintaining a regular and positive relationship with your key customers, you can strengthen their loyalty to your brand and reduce the risk of losing them to competitors. Customers who feel valued and appreciated are more likely to remain loyal to your business.

2. Referrals:

   Satisfied customers are more likely to refer their friends, family, and colleagues to your business, which can help you to attract new customers and increase revenue. By staying in touch with your key customers, you can keep your brand top of mind and encourage them to refer others to your business.

3. Feedback:

   Key customers are often your most valuable source of feedback. By keeping in touch with them, you can gather valuable insights into how your products or services are perceived, identify pain points or areas for improvement, and make necessary adjustments to enhance the customer experience.

4. Upselling and Cross-Selling:

   By maintaining regular communication with your key customers, you can identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell products or services that meet their needs and preferences. This can help you increase sales and revenue without acquiring new customers.

5. Competitive Advantage:

   By staying in touch with your key customers and understanding their needs and preferences, you can gain a competitive advantage over your rivals. This can help you to differentiate your brand, develop more effective marketing campaigns, and position your business as a leader in your industry.

6. Omni-channel:

   Omni-channel marketing is where you promote your products and services across all channels, devices, and platforms using unified messaging, brand visuals, and consistent collateral. Adopting an omnichannel approach in your marketing, sales, and service strategies has many benefits to driving revenues and engaging with audiences on the customers' preferred platform. Are these platforms aligned with your brand? Are they easy for the customer to understand your offering and make a purchase? Are there any pain points?

One of the best ways to understand your customer's pain points is by mapping their customer journey.

The customer journey is the process a customer goes through when interacting with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. By mapping out this journey, you can identify areas where your customers may be experiencing pain points, such as difficulties in finding information, long wait times, or poor communication.

Once you have identified these pain points, you can take steps to address them and improve the overall customer experience. For example, create more informative and user-friendly product pages, streamline customer service processes to reduce wait times or provide more personalised support to address individual customer needs.

Focusing on your customers' needs and pain points can build a stronger connection with them and improve the overall CX. 

You will drive brand loyalty if you ensure the customer's interaction with your company is smooth, pleasant and continuously improving. If not, you'll give your competitors your best gift – your customers.

Have you created a customer experience map for your brand? If not, give it a go, or contact us to run an effective workshop on your behalf.

91% of customers say they’re more likely to make another purchase after a great service experience. Great service experiences are personalised, seamless, and quick — simple in theory, but hard to deliver in reality.

88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services.

74% of customers say communicating honestly and transparently is more important now than before the pandemic. (Salesforce)

Source: Australian Loyalty Association – Survey Salesforce.

Author: Kerry Chew, Partner nem Australasia

This article is based on research and opinion available in the public domain.