CRM News South Africa

Five ways to boost customer relations

Customer relations is a key part of expanding a business. As customers are an integral part of businesses, the manner in which they are addressed and managed before and after patronising the business is of significance. It requires a form of strategy and planning that could retain customers and keep them engaged and interested.
Five ways to boost customer relations
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Here, Jovago - an online hotel booking service - shares some interesting ways to boost customer relations for small and medium-sized enterprises, which occupy a key part of the economies they exist in.

  1. Know your customers
  2. Surveys can be carried out to ensure that customer needs are known and customer habits are easily deciphered. Certain tools could be employed to study this properly. Customer relations management tools from Microsoft to Oracle exist to ensure that a business can anticipate customer needs before they even arise.

  3. Clear communication is key
  4. Language is a central part of communication and it's best when both parties are on the same page when a call is made. This conversation would be everything but clear if both parties speak different languages. The tone, styling and even accent should be taken into consideration. This is why it is quite preferable to have websites and customer care services available in local languages in order to draw in customers and portray the inclusiveness of the business.

  5. Maintain a great attitude
  6. Customers are needed for a business to have a good turnover, a bad attitude from a customer care attendant could be really off-putting. This could harm a business as customers are prone either positively or negatively to advertise a business through word of mouth. Which would it be for your business? Positive advertising hopefully. To get this, it's best to train customer care officials to maintain a good and open attitude towards customers at all times.

  7. Positive language boosts customer morale
  8. This is not to say that customer relations personnel are magicians (they are sometimes), but it is advisable to avoid negative statements as much as possible. Always try to redirect negative situations with positive statements.

  9. Satisfied customers are way better than grumpy customers
  10. Attending to customers and solving their problems in relation to the product is important, so instead of taking as many calls as possible from customers, focus should be paid to actually solving the issues that each customer has to complain about. The little things also count in customer relations. Handwritten notes with delivered orders and personalised birthday messages, amongst others, are great ways to start. This should get the business some good feedback, great reviews and positive advertising.

What other ways could be used to boost positive customer relations?

About Motunrayo Shafau

Motunrayo Shafau is a public relations associate at Jovago, Africa's leading hotel booking website. She loves to edit and create content on a wide range of topics ranging from faith to international relations and everything in-between.
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