A simple guide to building fantastic customer relationships 🤝
Relationship Building, in an organizational setting, is the ability to identify, initiate, develop, and maintain social relations in a way that is mutually beneficial to both, the customer and the company. At its core, our ability to build relationships is a function of our behavioral, or ‘soft’ skills. Organizations are now beginning to recognize the significance and true potential of building meaningful customer relationships.
Relationship building is critical to every customer-facing role, such as customer servicing, sales and marketing, and even stakeholder management. Effective relationships can not only enhance organizational success, but also drive brand recognition, and greater customer retention, and has thus become an integral skill for all customer-facing employees. In fact, when we consider relationships at a deeper level, and observe those between employees themselves, we find that organizations with stronger internal relations are more attuned to their mission-vision, and thus more likely to achieve their personal, professional, and organizational goals.
When done right, relationship-building brings pronounced efficacy in helping organizations achieve their larger goals. And there are easy ways to get started with fostering these relationships, one such example being the GATES approach of dealing with clients:
- Get involved: Take initiative, communicate actively, and build relationships based on commonalities through modalities that your customers prefer. This will foster the trust your clients have in you and will help exhibit your zeal.
- Assess communication styles: Be sensitive to social cues. Gauge vocal tones, client perceptions and speaking styles for they can go a long way in customizing strategies.
- Take detailed notes: Listen & reiterate from time to time. This will help you synthesize multiple perspectives and also demonstrate that you are paying attention to client needs.
- Empathize: Place yourself in their shoes. Try to acknowledge why the other person sees things the way they do. This will aid to mitigate conflicts and foster mutually respectful relationships.
- Schedule time to reconnect & seek feedback: Reserve slots in your schedule to reconnect with clients and seek their feedback . This will inspire confidence in the stakeholder, while demonstrating that you value them enough to improve your servicing capabilities and build lasting relationships with them.
Customer-facing teams that constructively build relationships can boost customer loyalty and satisfaction and lay the groundwork for organizations to understand their customer needs and motivations.
Are you building a customer-facing team?
Relationship building comes naturally to some, but requires consistent efforts and even training programs for others. This differential ability can be attributed to an individual’s skill set or their emotional & attitudinal abilities such as patience or extroversion. The ability to gauge these skills and abilities before hiring people in customer-facing roles can be the difference between a seamless onboarding experience with rapid results, and one with limited results and higher employee turnover.
Why does emotional intelligence matter when building relationships?
As a skill, building relationships infuses several components of emotional intelligence within itself, and thus, effective customer-facing teams must also be socially aware and emotionally intelligent in order to build productive relationships with various types of stakeholders.
After speaking to over 300 employers and parsing through decades of secondary research, Skillr has identified four sub skills indispensable for talent in customer-facing roles: Communication, Learning and reasoning, Collaboration, and Service-orientation, with each subskill containing one or more elements of emotional intelligence within themselves.
Learn more about how Skillr fuses emotional intelligence and behavioral skills to build customer-facing teams that delight and monetize your customers 🚀
While working with multiple stakeholders, for example, collaboration cannot be achieved effectively if an employee does not know how to manage conflicts or reconcile relationships and how to work collectively as a team member towards achieving shared objectives. Similarly, communication that involves EI components of active listening, and empathy can positively steer trust and rapport with clients, in turn allowing commercial relationships to last longer. Learning and reasoning that involves social awareness and emotional self-control, allow customer-facing employees to better understand the emotional states of customers, to then accordingly strategize or engage with various stakeholders. And lastly, service orientation includes the EI ingredients of initiative, optimism and transparency that together equip customer-facing teams with professional accountability and resilience at the workplace.
Thus, hiring talent that is measurably high on EQ and is objectively more skilled at building relationships is the fastest way to build customer-facing teams that outperform.
