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

By Maëlys De Santis & Coralie Petit

Published: 26 October 2024

Can you define customer relations?

It's a concept that's sometimes poorly understood, yet it plays a vital role in the sales and marketing strategy of companies, whatever the size of your organisation: from very small businesses to large groups 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 centralise all your company's efforts, to put the customer at the heart of your strategy and build customer loyalty.

Appvizer takes a closer look at the concept of customer relations and gives you some tips on how to nurture 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 and stable customer relationship.

Without customers, a business 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-centred to a customer-centred 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 need to humanise customer relations is felt primarily in sectors that rely on digital channels. The aim is to enhance the customer experience and promote the brand in a competitive environment.

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

L’Express

Why is it important to look after customer relations?

Because your customers are the lifeblood of your business

Customers mean sales, which means revenue. Without customers, a business is not viable.

For sales people, nurturing customer relationships is essential to keep your organisation financially afloat.

Because it sets you apart from your competitors

Today's customers are not only more demanding, 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 a few clicks and take out a new one with a competitor.

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

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

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 conditions.

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 basis of any good, successful customer relationship. This enables us to offer a personalised type of customer relationship that is 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, town, profession, interests, etc.
What are their needs? What are their underlying motivations? Their expectations?
What are their consumption habits? History of transactions and interactions, etc.
What are their preferred methods of communication? Email, social networks, telephone, etc.
What stops them from buying?

This invaluable information should not just be used by sales or customer service staff, but by every department in the company, so that every action or project is tailored as closely as possible to the customer's needs and preferences.

The information must be :

easily accessible
regularly updated,
be 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 their 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 and lasting relationship between your customer and your company.

Developing your interpersonal skills and knowing how to adapt to the profile and needs of your customers are essential qualities for optimising your customer relations.

Principle no. 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 tailor your approach 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 with multi-channel marketing

Customer relations need to be conducted via all media (mobile devices, smartphones and tablets). But above all, it is essential to approach the relationship through all distribution and communication channels.

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

There are many ways of achieving this:

emailing
telephone calls
post,
TEXT MESSAGES
websites
social networks, etc.

💡 Multi-channel increases interaction with your customers. By improving customer relationship management, this 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 that's available at all times.

Principle 5: Establish a relationship of trust

Trust is the key to any healthy, lasting 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 can'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 by ensuring that it accurately expresses your values, your expertise and the people who work for you. A good image is all very well, but a faithful image is even better.
highlight references. Whether it's the presentation of a successfully completed project or a testimonial from a peer, these are reassuring elements.
Be available. It's reassuring when you have a question or problem to solve to know that the company can be contacted quickly.

Principle no. 6: measure customer impact and satisfaction

In order to assess the impact of actions taken to improve customer satisfaction, and with a view to continuous improvement, we need to establish measurement tools. You can use customer satisfaction management software.

Here are some of the indicators used for this purpose:

CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score, which measures short-term satisfaction, usually by means of a score from 1 to 5;
the CES or Customer Effort Score, which encourages customers to assess the level of effort they have had to make at a specific stage in the customer journey, satisfaction being all the higher the less effort they have had to make, 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, intention to repurchase, etc.

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

Advocacy Drives Growth - London School of Economics

Try to keep the same indicators so that you can measure how they change over time on the basis of the same benchmark, and don't hesitate to use several in order to get a more global and complementary view.

💡 And it's not just the figures 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 during a questionnaire, and can teach you a lot.

Principle 7: Develop customer commitment

Customer satisfaction is good, but customer commitment is better. And why is that?

An engaged customer is a customer who feels involved with your brand, and who will act spontaneously in its favour, for example by :

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

From simple consumer to real player, or even ambassador, each new customer engagement brings its own 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, ask for their opinion, etc.

What type of relationship should you develop with your customers?

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

To do this, you need to develop a type of customer relationship centred on Customer Experience (CX). The idea? To take care of the interactions between your brand and the customer throughout their purchasing journey 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 to bear in mind

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

customer service available via several channels
efficient after-sales service or support,
clear communication
personalised 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, a sense of rapport is not enough. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) strategy is essential to help you boost your sales and create a strong bond with your customers.

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

CRM software is therefore an essential tool for your business. And why is that?

It targets contacts in a given market,
It centralises customer data,
It references customer needs,
It customises the sales offer,
It facilitates segmentation,
It allows you 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 time saving means you can offer your customers a much better customer experience, by being at their service to build a lasting customer relationship.