There are three rules I try to help people implement are: (1) be honest with your customers, (2) listen to your customers, and (3) interact with your customers in a consistent manner.

I want my clients to focus on having structured processes for how they interact with the end customer, to have clear policies that their customers can understand, and to give the feeling that they care about the customer.

When you look at a profitable customer relationship, I think what you’re really talking about is the ability to have a repeat customer. Repeat customers are profitable customers. The best way to get a repeat customer is to make them believe that you care about them. Aside from the fact that you have a good product or service, you care about this individual who is buying your product. The best way to demonstrate that is through customer relationship management. There are many ways to reach out to the end customer. You reach out through communication – through e-mail, letters, phone calls (phone calls are very intrusive, so we don’t recommend that method). If you have good information about your customer, you can better direct your products and services towards that customer. You can position your products and services towards that customer’s current needs, and thus will create a longer term more profitable relationship with that customer.

The customer is the biggest point of feedback. Most customers are very, very transparent. If your products are not suited to their needs or the marketplace, they will let you know. If your products no longer fit their needs, they will let you know. So it’s important to hear the customer and to ensure that you understand the messages that the customer is sending to you.

Customer relationships are best managed through information. The more information you have about your customer, the better you can manage the relationship – meaning manage the expectation of the customer, manage how the information about your product and service is conveyed to the customer, as well as manage how easily and effectively you can be accessed by the customer. The underlying challenge is really to make every experience of the customer a very positive one. Even if your service or your product has a flaw, if the interaction that the customer has with the company’s representative is a positive one, it goes a long way toward establishing a strong foundation for the customer relationship.

We make sure that even when customers are unreasonable or incorrect in their assumptions or their expectations we still present to them the best face that we can for our clients. This often means convincing customers that they should look at how the product or service has benefited them, and telling them that we will certainly accept the feedback regarding their suggestions or expectations that were not met. You want customers to feel good about a situation that would otherwise not have gone well especially if it can be done by simply listening to them. We also make sure that customers have a broad range of information about the company and its services. We make sure that our representatives are well prepared with information, that they are very up-to-date on the company’s policies and practices, and that they are not in any way misleading the customer.

Customer loyalty has to be created. It does not exist to start with. Customers will no longer give you the benefit of the doubt once they have a poor experience with your service, product or, even worse, a relationship interaction. You have to build on their experience every time they interact with your representatives as a company. One of the best ways to create loyalty is to be consistent in your approach and to always make sure you’re aligning your products and services with the customers’ expectations and their current requirements; to the extent that they start to trust you as a company, you are building customer loyalty. Customers tend to be very fickle once they feel that they’ve been cheated, as in their expectations have not been met. You could spend a long time building so-called customer loyalty, and then one mistake that goes uncorrected could bring an end to the relationship.

To help our clients gain customer loyalty, we focus a lot on consistency of the experience. We tend to have multiple interactions with the customer, and we want to make their experience as positive the first time as it is the last time. We try to ensure that they get the same information if they call up three separate times. We try to make sure our clients update the information that customers need, or have the answers to the queries they may have, or be in tune with the expectations customers have.

Loyalty and retention go hand in hand. By building customer loyalty, you are ensuring customer retention. Customer retention is not a stand- alone concept; it is merely the end result of having built enough customer loyalty so that you know you can count on customers to come back to you when they next need your product or services.

The life cycle of a customer starts with understanding the customer’s needs. Once you understand a person’s need, you can position your product or service to meet that need. The next step, of course, is to ensure that the customer is aware of the product or service that you are putting on the marketplace. Once a customer has decided to acquire your product or service, the important thing is to make your customer comfortable with the risk they are taking. So you want to give the customer the option of returning the product or service, or of deciding to try it at little or no risk to them.

Once the customer has used the product or service, you want to ensure that you continue to stay in touch, so it’s very important that you learn about your customers and know who they are. You have to convince customers that they should come back to you with that information. You can do it through a warranty information card, which never works. Or you can do it by giving them some incentive to get in touch with you. It may be through a rebate process. Rebates are big, because people will fill in a form to get two dollars back. Online registrations have also started to become an easy way to access the customer, especially if some incentive can be provided to fill out the online information

When customers call in with a complaint of some kind, you need to take that very seriously because at the end of the day, you are learning about the customer. You learn their name, address, telephone number – whatever information is available, you want it. And at the same time, you have an opportunity to help the customer use your product or service, and if there’s some fault with your product or service, the fastest way to determine what the fault is and fix it is by hearing about it through the customer. So you do need to take customer interaction through the customer service organization very seriously. Finally, I think the ultimate goal is to get the consumer to try the product or service in the future and to become a brand ambassador. And the best way for companies to ensure that is to think of every customer interaction as the basis for the next purchase