Why is a Personal Relationship with Your Customer is Important?

Building Personal relationships is the key to success in today's competitive world. Remember, building customer relations is not enough for success anymore! You have to build a personal relationship with your customers. Else, you are destined to be failed in today's competitive world. Therefore, all the major brands of the world like Nike, Apple, Tesla, Google, and Amazon are building personal relationships with their customers. Although all of them are using different strategies to build a personal relationship, the goal of all these brands is to build a personal relationship with their customers. Let's understand, what it means?

What does Personal Relationship with Customer means?

The personal relationship with customers means building the relationship with customers at an individual level by approaching their hearts and minds. Nike is doing it by empowering the athletes with slogans of Just do it. Apple is doing it with a "be different" campaign. Tesla is doing it by putting Elon Musk as the face of Tesla Motors. Google is doing it by reaching every customer with their services, and Amazon is doing it by Jeff Bezos' customer-obsessed approach. In short, a personal relationship with a customer is entirely different from the old customer service and relation approach. Let's understand it in detail!

Key differences between Personal Relationship and Customer Relations

The concept of customer relations was built on the idea of building relationships with all of your customers at macro levels. To maintain customer relations, companies used to hire customer relations staff and spend huge budgets on media. However, in building a personal relationship with customers, companies invest in improving individual customer experience instead of spending on media advertising for a mass approach. The same is the case with staffing. The approach is shifted toward quality assurance staff instead of damage control staff in the shape of customer relationship managers. Hence, the personal relationship with customers is a key component of branding.

What is the impact of Personal Relationships on Branding and Profit?

Branding is what your customers think! No, it is not the narrative you want to put in their thoughts! It is what they think of you based on their experience. Hence, there is a direct impact of a personal relationship with customers on your branding. If you have no personal relationship with a particular customer, you are not a brand for that customer. You do not exist in the life of that person! Contrary to that, if you are building a personal relationship by providing a customized product or service, you exist! And make a profit as well! So, a personal relationship with the customer has a direct impact on branding and profit.

Why Personal Relationship with your Customer is important?

A personal relationship with your customer is the key to the survival and growth of the company. Furthermore, it holds key importance for the success of the company as it enables companies to achieve more in the following ways.

Personal Relationship Connect Customer with Brand

Branding is a vital part of the business and businesses invest heavily in their branding. However, building a personal relationship with the customer is the ultimate solution for businesses as personal relationships connect the customer with the brand. Tesla Motors is taking advantage of this personal connection in a true sense. A single tweet from Elon Musk is always enough to connect with customers on behalf of Tesla. Hence, a personal relationship with a customer is very important for the success of a business because it enables brands to connect with customers.

Personal Relationship with customer enables you to win Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is one of the best assets for any company. It generates results without putting in any extra effort. How many people you have seen who say that they only use Apple products and they will not use android? Indeed, a lot! Even, if they are less in number still, they are the loyal customers of the Apple brands. This helps Apple to spend even less budget on customer retention and that budget can be used to acquire more customers. This customer loyalty can only be achieved by building a personal relationship with the customer. Hence, building a personal relationship is very important.

Personal Relationship decrease Customer Retention Cost

The cost of acquiring a new customer is high and the cost of retaining is less. However, the cost of building the personal relationship for retention is even less! How-you may ask? The answer is very simple. The main focus of building a personal relationship is always on creating personalized and improved individual experiences. In this way, the processes of the company are improved significantly and the customer enjoys the experience. Hence, the customer cannot leave the personalized experience, and therefore, the goal of customer retention is achieved without a heavy cost.

Personal Relationship with customers enables an organization to Build Customized Solutions

One solution fits all is the recipe for disaster in today’s customer world! This is even more important in emerging industries. Therefore, every organization is accepting the need to build a customized solution for their customers. However, it is not easy to build customized solutions due to the complications and constraints of different variations. Still, to some extent, every other organization is trying to employ a customized solution for their customers. The prime example of this is the car companies, who used to offer certain colors of cars but now car companies are in the race to build cars that can change color according to the wish of the customer at any time. This is happening because personal relationships with customers have guided the companies.

Personal Relationships with customers pave way for new business Opportunities

New business opportunities can come with the help of personal relationships with customers. Amazon was a bookstore until they contacted their customers at the individual level and asked what they want to buy along with books on Amazon. Now, the outcome of this personal relationship approach is evident from the success of Amazon. The same is the case with Nike founders Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight. They reached out to the ground level of athletes who were the end-users of the product. Based on the input, they kept changing and improving their product until they were better than their Japanese sourcing factory. The story of Nike is evidence that personal relationships with customers pave way for new business opportunities.

Personal Relationships with customers help organizations to build the brand

Building a brand is not easy! It takes generations! However, building the brand starts with the personal relationship with the customer. This personal relationship of the customer and with the customer is the key to building brands. Take this example, when Elon Musk wanted to start an electric car company, he knew that Tesla Motors was registered in someone's name already. However, he knew the name of Tesla Motors was the key in building a brand due to the famous inventor Nikola Tesla and customers' connection with Nikola Tesla. Therefore, he went at great length to acquire the name.

At one point in time, it was the duty of the most humble and nice employee of Elon Musk to sit in front of the house of the person who own the name! In this way, they managed to acquire a name that has a personal relationship with customers. Hence, it is correct that personal relationships hold key importance.

How to Build a Personal Relationship with Your Customer?

Indeed, it is important to build a personal relationship with your customer! However, it is a double edge sword as if you build a negative personal relationship then you will have drastic outcomes. Therefore, it is very important to ensure that how you are building a personal relationship with your customer. Following are the major ways to build a personal relationship with your customer.

Invest in Building Individual Experience

The best way to build a personal relationship with your customer is to build individual experiences and then convert them to the overall strategy. Take the example of Amazon; it is investing heavily to improve the individual experience by offering services like Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime is the subscription service of Amazon in which it provides the delivery same day or within one or two days. Fast delivery improved the individual and Amazon has a fleet of 95 airplanes just to deliver packages! It all happened because they invested in building individual experience of fast delivery. Indeed, 200 million subscribers of Amazon Prime are the evidence of this method.

Invest in branding to connect with customer

I use only Apple! I love to drive Tesla! Have you ever listened to these statements? These statements indicate that the customers value brand over the product! Apple users will never say that they only use iPhone Model 11 or 13, instead, they say they use the Apple device! Whatever it is, it should be an Apple device. The same is the case with Tesla, customers say that they drive Tesla instead of saying that they drive model S! Hence, they show that they are connected with the brand, not the product. This situation shows that both of these brands are strong and they managed to build a personal relationship with the customer. Contrary to that, you always hear Toyota Corolla, Suzuki Bolan, and Suzuki Mehran! It shows that the brand without a product is not connected to the customer at a personal level.

Invest in ensuring Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the building block of a personal relationship with customers. A dissatisfied customer will never want to connect with your organization on a personal relationship. Therefore, you must invest in ensuring customer satisfaction at all costs! Remember, it does not matter that your customer is right or wrong, the thing that matters is that the customer is satisfied! Amazon is offering a money-back guarantee on tons of products, just to ensure customer satisfaction. Furthermore, they have a smooth process to return the amount within a day instead of lingering on it. Hence, the customers reorder if they have ordered a wrong variation or anything! In this way, Amazon is leveraging customer satisfaction to build a personal relationship with the customer.

Build and Introduce Customer-Centric Policies in Your Organization

The last way to build a personal relationship with the customer is to introduce customer-centric policies in your organization. Customer-centric policies are the key to building a personal relationship with the customer. The companies that have a strong personal relationship but are failing to implement customer-centric policies also end up failing. It happens because the relationship between the company and its customer must be mutually beneficial for both parties and this benefit can only be ensured by introducing and implementing customer-centric policies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a personal relationship with your customer is very important! It is the core component of success for all companies. The companies that will shift to building a personal relationship with the customer will flourish instead of the companies that will stick to the old conventional customer service. Luckily, most of the major players, in every other industry, are implementing the concept of building a personal relationship with customers and hence, changing the way they do things! If you want to improve as well, read all the industry updates on our blog.