The Three Secrets to a Better Customer Relationship

Tuesday, Jun 28th 2022
Woman standing in front of parcel locker holding phone and package

Strong customer relationships are underpinned by communication. Brands that interact appropriately, thoughtfully and usefully with their customers can expect a high level of retention and satisfaction. As easy and as simple as that sounds, companies with even a modest sized customer-base can risk irritating or alienating their customers if they lack the processes and technologies to carefully manage communications. Here we look at three aspects that help companies build better relationships with their customers.

Automation is Key 

Any level of automation should bring about efficiency gains and, from a communications perspective, it should facilitate the creation of personalized mail. Systems that automatically add personalized marketing messages, overlays or enclosures to documents have two main benefits. First, it enables brands to communicate 1:1 with customers, making them feel more valued and creating more engagement. Secondly, automating the process reduces manual, laborious workloads, freeing staff to concentrate on higher-value tasks

Know thyself 

There is a saying in the world of computing; ‘garbage in, garbage out’, the meaning of which is fairly obvious: if you don’t have good data in the first place, you cannot expect to make good decisions based on it. When it comes to customer details and preferences, maintaining them is critical. Ensuring accuracy means you won’t ever send the wrong person the wrong item, as well as avoid sending unwanted items, saving on costs

Balancing multichannel  

For the most part, brands today will communicate with their customers using both email and printed letters. Using different methods of communication concurrently enables brands to be much more flexible but it carries certain risks. For example, if the processes by which email and letters are sent are segregated, and separate teams are using them to communicate across the full customer-base, there is a chance that conflicting communications are sent to the same customer, or the same communication is sent via both email and in printed form. This can be confusing and annoying for customers, so centralized management is  necessary to provide a better level of control and visibility.  

Creating and nurturing strong customer relationships takes time, care and effort. Unfortunately, all this work can be un-done very quickly if processes and systems lead to poorly executed communications campaigns. Businesses should ask themselves if they have the right tools in place that will give them the level of control and sophistication to ensure that they only send the right communications to the right customers at the right time.