Learning to listen is crucial to preserving customer relations.
Building strong and healthy relationships is vital to the long-term welfare of any business. Yet consumer confidence has dropped sharply in virtually every economic sector since 1994, when the University of Michigan began compiling its American Customer Satisfaction Index. To overcome these perceptions, businesses must pursue a comprehensive approach that focuses on aggressive listening, and training managers to deliver that change.
Learn To Listen
Learning to listen--and responding to customers' unspoken needs--is crucial to building relationships with them, according to author-consultant Diane Berenbaum. By building a culture of accountability and mutual respect, stronger connections with customers become possible, because they know that their complaints are taken seriously, according to Berenbaum.
Establish Effective Processes
Ensuring that well-defined processes exist to serve customer needs is another vital method of building relationships. Failing to establish such processes creates "speed bumps" that exert greater pressure on managers to solve problems, and makes outside intervention more necessary.
Understand The Base
Deciding what type of customers the company will serve is an essential building block for success. No company can be all things to all people--so knowing the potential customer base is critical in deciding which relationships to pursue, according to British consultant Dr. Graham Oakes. Without that focus, a company's mission becomes that much more harder to define.
Promote Change Agents
Changing a company culture is crucial to success, particularly if a company hopes to turn its flagging fortunes around. A key element of this strategy is to make managers the key agents of that change. Managers must learn the coaching skills they'll need to provide the personal skills that customers expect from companies hoping to earn their trust.
