Keeping Your Clients Close: Understanding Customer Intimacy

How much do you know about your clients, as individual customers and in general?

Most world-class brands prioritize customer intimacy and in turn enjoy the numerous benefits of forming business rapports with their clientele.

You not only enjoy repeat business and advocacy but also gain valuable insights into customer problems and do quality improvement

But as firms grow in all aspects and activities pile up, most businesses lose touch with their customers.

Yet the consequences of a long-distance with clients can be as detrimental as losing some of them or tainted brand reputation.

Defining Customer Intimacy

This is a customer lifecycle management approach that seeks to different consumer needs to provide the best overall remedy.

The kind of closeness business should seek should go beyond good customer support and quality product or service delivery.

Effective execution calls for collaboration between senior executives and first-line support departments.

You must  earn customer loyalty to achieve intimacy, and that’s how it fits into customer lifecycle management.

How to Keep Your Customers Close to Your Brand

Here are some ways to maintain client intimacy and enjoy lifetime business.

1. Cultivate a Customer-centric Culture in your Business

To some extent customer is king no matter your industry or type of business. They are the reason we are in business and without them we’d close up and go home.

So focusing on every other aspect of business and ignoring your clients is not the best approach for a business that is looking to thrive and survive for a long time.

At a business is rising on its feet, retailers are desperate to attract and win as many clients as possible. But this hype fades away soon after the customer base grows and the business has too much on its plate.

However, firms that prioritize customer problems manage to grow into big brands. Focusing on customers lead to a continuous feedback and quality improvement cycle.

2. Streamline your customer service 

Customer support is essential in maintaining closeness with your customer base.

Most customers reach out to customer service teams with their problems and concerns. That is the one time many of them will come looking for your business and they expect you to respond swiftly.

If you prove difficult to get to when clients need you most then they will lose trust in your services or goods and business in general.

The long distance nature of online retail makes customer support a critical tool in maintaining customer intimacy.

A satisfying customer service experience insist on quick response and instant problem resolution and little follow up and churn. Offering personalized customer service is also an excellent way to address different client problems.

Power your support team with tools like help desk solutions and live chat software to optimize your customer service operations.

Train your support team on customer care and problem resolution to increase client satisfaction. Stress on the importance of solving problems without annoying customers and the benefits of listening to issues before suggesting a solution.

Remind your agents that they are the face of your brand.

3. Organize One-on-ones

One-one-one contact such as phone or video calls or tradeshows help maintain the human touch that’s essential for business.

If you want to build a long-lasting relationships with your customers then face-to-face communication is a must.

For ecommerce business, a physical presence is almost becoming a must-have. If clients can’t see you then trusting you will almost impossible.

4. Familiarize with and streamline the customer journey 

One way to improve client closeness is to create a friction-free process from product search to checkout and all the way to product delivery.

How you organize all these processes will determine whether a prospects turns into a client, becomes a repeat buyer and begin recommending your brand.

Eliminating friction in the customer journey eases the process of moving from search to checkout and reduces the chances of abandonment due to complicated or unclear policies.

Being there for your customer throughout their journey is also an excellent way to make more conversions. Customers do not love to be left in the blind so you want to give guide them through every step of the journey.

Other ways to increase Intimacy

  • Organizing customer events
  • Empowering clients to organize meet-ups
  • Focusing on personalization
  • Making data-driven decisions
  • Providing an all-inclusive solution

Final Words

Get intimate with your customers today and see how much it will improve your bottom line in a matter of months. Follows these customer intimacy best practices to keep your customers close.