Making & Keeping Customer Connections In A Digital Era

Make the value that you give your customers so high it doesn’t matter what the price is. Based on the experiences your brand consistently delivers, your customers should have no idea what your competition charges.

You don’t need to raise your prices. You need to bring value and better service. This includes employee training – and be sure they understand how to build and keep relationships.

3 Strategies To Dominate The Relationship Economy

1. Use technology to allow employees to focus on what’s most important: building relationships that result in higher customer loyalty.
2. Build a culture that creates emotional connections with your employees.
3. Create relationship-building training for new and existing employees.

Things That CAN Be Trained:

• Authenticity
• Insatiable curiosity
• Incredible empathy
• Great listening skills

The 1 Thing That CANNOT Be Trained:

• The ability to love people

Let’s focus on what can be trained and what these traits look like.

Authenticity:

• You love what you do, and it’s obvious.
• You’re transparent – if you have bad news, don’t hold it back.
• You are as committed to the success of your customer as they are.
• You know your clients’ top three goals for the year.
• Your customer should not be able to imagine a world without your business in it.

Make the value that you give your customers so high it doesn’t matter what the price is

Insatiable Curiosity:  

• You’re dying to learn about others.
• You want to know about both familiar and unfamiliar subjects.
• You’re willing to meet as strangers but leave as friends.

Incredible Empathy:

• You look at things from the customer’s perspective.
• You put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
• You listen and think from the other person’s point of view, allowing their message to become much clearer.
• You’re wary of empathy fatigue and able to reset yourself.

Great Listening:

• You give them fierce attention.
• You ask a question and then more questions.
• You don’t defend questions and instead explore new ones.
• You bounce questions back.
• You fight the urge to reply before you finish listening.

Every employee should possess these four traits, and you should be willing to train your team to deliver on these traits. When you successfully bring these four elements together, you are set up for success and have the foundation to build and maintain strong relationships with your customers.

Leah Tobak is a Project Manager with Petra Coach. With a background in public relations and marketing, she’s done a lot of work building relationships with customers and prospective customers. Outside of the corporate landscape, Leah is an international model and is known for her work in front of the camera.