What is customer relations? Definition and CRM for good customer management!

By Maëlys De Santis & Coralie Petit

Published: October 26, 2024

Can you define customer relations?

It's a little-known concept, yet it plays a vital role in sales and marketing strategy, whatever the size of your organization: from small businesses to large corporations and SMEs.

70% of French consumers say they will leave a brand if it makes a mistake more than twice.

Relationclientmag.fr

Customer relationship management must therefore centralize all your company's efforts, to put the customer at the heart of your strategy and thus build customer loyalty.

Appvizer takes a closer look at the concept of customer relations, and gives you the keys to nurturing them.

See all software Customer relationship management

What are the principles of customer relations?

How do you define customer relations?

The aim of customer relations is to create and retain a company's customers. This is its raison d'être, which is twofold:

it conquers customers, by identifying prospects and turning them into customers,
it satisfies customers in order to retain them, by establishing a healthy, stable customer relationship.

Without customers, a company is not viable. Establishing good customer relations is therefore essential.

What is the role of customer relations?

Good customer relations mean focusing your strategy primarily on the customer, moving from a product-centric to a customer-centric vision.

What's more, your customers' or prospects' decisions are based on factual elements, but also on their emotions. The human dimension must not be neglected if you are to build a lasting relationship with your customer.

☝️ The humanization of customer relations is a need that is mainly felt in sectors that rely on digital channels. The aim is to enhance the customer experience and promote the brand in a competitive context.

2% of visitors to an e-commerce site become customers, compared with 40% of visitors to a physical store.

L’Express

Why is it important to nurture customer relations?

Because your customers are the lifeblood of your company

Customers mean sales, and therefore revenue. Without customers, a company is not viable.

For sales people, nurturing customer relationships is essential to the financial health of your organization.

Because it sets you apart from your competitors

Today's customers not only have more demanding requirements, they can also move from one service to another more quickly and easily.

👉 The example of ISPs (internet service providers) or telephone operators is significant. Dissatisfied customers can cancel their contracts in just a few clicks and sign up for a new one with a competitor.

Good customer relationship management is therefore a competitive advantage in a difficult market ! While customers may sometimes find offers similar, a good sense of customer relations translates into a positive brand image, and can make the difference with undecided customers. It helps win over customers, or convince warm prospects more simply with a strong sales argument.

👎 Conversely, an ineffective or non-existent customer relationship will have two kinds of consequences: not only will it make it difficult for you to find new customers, but it may also cause you to lose existing ones.

Because it builds customer loyalty

A satisfied customer is a loyal customer!

👉 Think about it: it's a virtuous circle. You take care of your customers by offering them appropriate solutions to their problems, by being attentive. Your customers know they can count on you, and that you know how to respond to their requests in the best possible way.

They are loyal to your brand and your products or services: they turn to you as soon as they express a new need.

20% of your customers represent 80% of your sales.

Loi de Pareto

What is good customer relations? The 7 principles of customer relations

Principle no. 1: know your customer

Knowing your customers is the foundation of any successful customer relationship. This enables us to offer a personalized type of customer relationship, one that's better adapted and more effective.

To do this, you need to gather information by answering a few questions:

Who is my customer? First name, age, gender, city, profession, interests, etc.
What are their needs? What are their underlying motivations? What are their expectations?
What are their consumption habits? Transaction and interaction history, etc.
What are their preferred modes of communication? Email, social networks, telephone, etc.
What stops them from buying?

This valuable information should not only be used by sales or customer service, but by every department in the company, so that every action or project is tailored to the customer's needs and preferences.

Information must be :

easily accessible,
regularly updated,
completed by each employee, in particular using a CRM system.

Principle no. 2: listen to your customer

Every sale starts with the customer, and more specifically with his or her needs.

By actively listening to your customer :

you show your interest,
you identify their precise needs,
you can better prepare your sales pitch,
you sell better,
you establish a solid, lasting relationship between your customer and your company.

Developing interpersonal skills and knowing how to adapt to a customer's profile and needs are essential qualities for optimizing customer relations.

Principle 3: implement a relationship strategy

To implement a relationship strategy in your team, you need to qualify your prospects and then segment your contact base (prospects, customers). This qualification enables you to personalize your approach according to each customer profile.

Then, the frequency of contact with a given customer is determined by the segmentation of your base: you don't need to spend as much time with one customer as another; you don't follow the same rhythm during the sales process.

Principle no. 4: multiply interactions through multi-channel marketing

It's essential to build customer relationships across all media (mobile devices, smartphones and tablets). But above all, it's essential to understand the relationship across all distribution and communication channels.

The multi-channel approach is a technique that enables you to access the customer through several channels. It multiplies the number of contacts you make with your customers, and fulfils a number of functions: reminding them that you're listening to them, and that you're there to help them find solutions to their problems.

There are many ways to achieve this:

emailing,
telephone,
postal mail,
SMS,
website,
social networks, etc.

💡 Multichannel increases interaction with your customers. By improving customer relationship management, it will make it easier to establish a lasting customer relationship.

What's more, you'll enable your customers to benefit from customer service and assistance available at all times.

Principle 5: Establish a relationship of trust

Trust is the key to any lasting, healthy relationship, and customer relations are no exception. But how do you lay the foundations for such a relationship?

Here are a few valuable tips:

Be honest and transparent. Don't make promises you won't keep, and don't try to hide the truth from your customers. Authenticity is the key.
have a faithful brand image. Take care of your image, ensuring that it accurately expresses your values, your expertise and the people who work for you. A beautiful image is good, but a faithful one is even better.
highlight references. Whether it's the presentation of a completed project or a testimonial from a peer, these are reassuring elements.
be available. When you have a question or problem to solve, it's reassuring to know that the company can be reached quickly.

Principle no. 6: measure customer satisfaction and impact

In order to assess the impact of customer satisfaction initiatives, and in the interests of continuous improvement, you need to establish measurement tools. You can use customer satisfaction management software.

The following indicators are used for this purpose:

CSAT, or Customer Satisfaction Score, measures short-term satisfaction, usually by means of a score from 1 to 5;
CES, or Customer Effort Score, encourages customers to assess the level of effort they have had to make at a given stage of the customer journey, satisfaction being all the higher the lower the level of effort, and vice versa;
NPS, or Net Promoter Score, measures a customer's propensity to recommend a brand, service or product;
other indicators: opinions, comments and feedback, intent to repurchase, etc.

A 7% increase in NPS generates on average 1% more sales.

Advocacy Drives Growth - London School of Economics

Try to keep the same indicators so you can measure their evolution over time on the basis of the same frame of reference, and don't hesitate to use several in order to get a more global and complementary vision.

💡 And it's not just the numbers that count! More informal feedback in the course of a telephone or face-to-face conversation can bring out elements that you wouldn't have been able to gather from a questionnaire, and can teach you a lot.

Principle 7: Develop customer commitment

Customer satisfaction is good, customer commitment is better. Why is this so?

An engaged customer is one who feels involved with your brand, and will act spontaneously on its behalf, for example by :

posting a review on your website,
commenting on your publications on social networks,
telling others about you (word-of-mouth), etc.

From simple consumer to real player, or even ambassador, each new customer engagement brings its own set of benefits, such as a higher loyalty rate and a positive impact on brand image.

👉 To encourage customer engagement, multiply the opportunities to interact with them, share your content, solicit their opinion, etc.

What kind of relationship should you develop with your customers?

Building the solid, healthy foundations mentioned above with your customers is already the guarantee of a successful customer relationship. But what if you set your objectives even higher, by offering an experience that provokes positive emotions that your customers will remember?

To do this, you need to develop a type of customer relationship centered on Customer Experience (CX). The idea? Take care of the interactions between your brand and the customer throughout the purchasing process and across the various points of contact, in order to have a positive and natural impact on the brand's image.

How can you improve your customer relationship management strategy?

Points of attention

To enhance your customer relations, pay attention to the following points:

multi-channel customer service,
efficient after-sales service and support,
clear communication,
personalized messages and offers,
involving your customers in the life of your company, by taking their opinions or requests into account, for example.

Implementing a CRM strategy

If you want your relationship with your customers to be solid, long-lasting and, above all, effective, you need more than just a sense of rapport. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) strategy is essential to help you boost sales and create a strong bond with your customers.

Download our free CRM template, a ready-to-use example:

As a result, CRM software is an indispensable tool for your business. Why should it be?

It targets contacts in a given market,
It centralizes customer data,
It references customer needs,
It personalizes the sales offer,
It facilitates segmentation,
It enables us to respond better and faster to customers, etc.

In other words, a CRM like Simple CRM saves you time by automating low-value-added tasks. This saves you time, enabling you to offer your customers a much higher quality customer experience, by being at their service to build a lasting customer relationship.