Tag Archive for: Customer Service

Why Is It Important to Establish Rapport with Clients?

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build rapport with clients

If you’re in sales, customer service, marketing, consulting, running a small business, or work with an agency, or in any kind of customer/client-facing role, it’s likely you’ve heard of the importance of building rapport with clients. But what exactly does it mean to build rapport and why is this important? In this article, we will explore the importance of building rapport, its benefits, and how to foster this type of symbiotic, trusting relationship with clients.

Establishing rapport with clients boils down to one simple, yet crucial concept: Trust. Building trust with clients is a lengthy process, and no easy feat, yet paramount in any kind of business partnership. Putting in the work to build and maintain trust between you and your client is proven to be rewarding in a myriad of ways. Let's unpack them.

Benefits of Building Rapport With Clients

Trust is a difficult thing to build, and an easy thing to lose. The world's most successful businesses focus on building rapport that will allow them to offer a more intuitive product and maintain the trust customers put in them by continuing to invest in the business relationship. Let's explore a few measurable benefits of building and maintaining excellent rapport with your clients.

1. More Sales

A whopping 89% of customers will make a repeat purchase after a positive customer service experience. Customers are more likely to invest in your product when you've invested in your relationship. If you've built rapport with your customer, they will enthusiastically reach out to you again and again for help, advice, and new products or solutions, even if you've yet to deliver results.

2. Better Reputation

A 2020 Walker study found that a great customer experience will trump price and even product quality, differentiating your brand with an immediate reputation for great and long-lasting relationships. Happy and trusting clients are more likely to provide positive reviews of your business, and recommend you to others, giving you the opportunity to win over even more clients.

3. Stand Out From The Competition

While some companies are forced to focus on simply keeping up with trends and staying current, others are taking advantage of the rapport they've built with their clients to work smarter, not harder. Consumers are loyal to both the best products and services, and businesses that value transparency, authenticity, and longevity of customer relationships.

How to Build Rapport With a Client?

Now that we understand a few of the crucial benefits of building excellent rapport with clients, let's discuss a few easy practices you should be implementing to ensure excellent rapport with a customer.

1. Ask Questions

Ask your client rapport-building questions about their personal view of their company and business goals. Listening carefully will give you a clear idea of client priorities, and unique insight into how to meet their needs. Examples of rapport-building questions include a more personal line of questioning like,” I see you attended X university! What did you like best about your time there?” Asking informed questions to build rapport shows the client you are dedicated to offering a tailor-made product and long-lasting relationship and will take their goals to heart – and to the bank.

2. Listen Empathetically

Practice active listening, and make note of keywords, critical issues, and primary goals. By closing your mouth and opening your ears, you are also opening the door for more trusting future communication and a long-lasting relationship, where your customer feels comfortable seeking you out for advice, or future work.

3. Establish Common Ground

Using small talk to find common ground is a great way of establishing rapport with clients, and showing a genuine interest, which is a tough thing to fake! A rapport-building question about a detail of the client blog or website is a great way to demonstrate a common interest in their business and success. Asking open-ended questions will help your client “open up,” and share personal experiences that you might share, for a firm and trusting foundation to your relationship.

4. Mirror & Match

The “mirror and match” technique draws on the truth that we prefer to interact with people who we perceive to be similar to ourselves. What we say is negligible, when our body language and voice portray disinterest or a lack of understanding. The most successful communicators watch and mimic the body language of others, adopt a similar temperament, use similar language, and attempt to match the tone, tempo, and volume of the other person's voice. Science says that employing these methods of connection results in stronger intimacy, trust, and client rapport.

Rapport-building questions are an easy way to make a personal, more long-lasting connection with existing and potential customers. If a company culture of excellent customer relationships sounds like it could benefit your business, contact ListenTrust today, or read on to learn more about how establishing rapport with clients through the use of bilingual customer service can future-proof and globalize your business.

Get Started by Contacting ListenTrust Today!

For more information, contact Tom Sheppard, VP of Business Development, at: tsheppard@listentrust.com.

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Personalized Customer Service

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Storefront employee delivers personalized customer service.

Customer service is a necessary part of any business, but it is also a way for a brand to set itself apart from the competition. A company that steps up customer service with personalization will enjoy the same benefits as when a regular customer walks into a brick-and-mortar store. Tailored, personalized, and memorable customer service leaves a lasting impression that also offers the highest level of" customer service" and improves your brand's overall standing." 

What Is Personalized Customer Service?

It may be easy to assume the personalizing customer service means using a script to add the customer's name in the opening line or something similar, but there are more nuanced ways to add personalization. Personalized customer care also means adapting to a customer's needs and expectations. Instead of having customers fit through the business's service funnel, the business should react to each customer's needs. However, what one customer prefers might alienate others or be insufficient. No two people are the same, so no two customers should want or need the same things. Keeping everyone as happy as possible with the methods they prefer gives customers a choice of ways to interact and ways to speak up if something isn't going right." 

Benefits of Personalizing Customer Service

Personalizing customer service may seem like an impossibly detailed task, but there are multiple ways to achieve your goal, some of which are explained below:

Attainable Expectations

Customers today expect personalization and customized experiences, but there is also more worry over data privacy than ever before. Typically, businesses use customer data and feedback to tailor future experiences, but not everyone wants to hand over their data. When done correctly, companies can safely use and store customer data to create personal experiences customers want without data misuse’s shady downsides. When companies track purchase history, service interactions, feedback, and more for the business’s betterment, the company can offer better service exactly how that customer wants.

Faster Customer Service

Personalized service may sound like it takes more time, but personalized experiences help resolve issues faster once the system is up and running. When customer service agents know everything about a customer, they can anticipate or prepare for likely questions. Having the answers and customer preferences at the ready makes each interaction much more efficient and gets the customer to their desired end much faster.

Balance Between Agents and Automation

Automation is a technology we have been dreaming of for years, and AI is now a core part of many business strategies, but we cannot forget the human side of customer support. Each method has the best use situations. Sometimes a customer does not want to talk to a live human agent for a simple issue they can fix with a chatbot or phone tree. Other times, customers want to let out their frustrations with a product to a live human or need help with a more complex issue than automated systems can handle. When it is clear a human response is needed, the transition must be fast. A customer who wants to talk to a person will not suffer through a long winding phone tree for awfully long, nor should they have to. Moving from an automated system to a live agent should be fast and seamless, preferably with only the bush of a button or voice command. Tracing customer preferences over time can help determine which customers want to speak to an agent and which do not so you can provide personalized service without any interruptions.

How to Provide a Personalized Experience

You cannot control your competitors' prices, size, or any other factors, but you can make your business better in different ways. Providing a personalized experience for your customers is useful for various reasons. Still, it can help customers return to your business rather than move to a competitor, as most people would rather do business with someone who knows your name rather than a faceless company. For many customers, better customer service, including personalization, is enough to keep them loyal to your business over other options. You can get creative with ways you personalize experiences for customers; below are just a few examples of ways you can personalize the customer experience and enjoy the benefits:

  • Reward and recognize loyal customers with over-time programs.
  • Know your customer's name and proper capitalization.
  • Reward feedback with messages when feedback is considered or implemented.
  • Offer free classes, trials, or demonstrations so customers can see exactly what they are buying, which eliminates doubt or quality concerns.
  • Send a personalized, handwritten note to customers with orders for a pleasant surprise in the box or on their birthday as an inexpensive way to reach out.
  • Recognize or feature customers' experiences on your website or social media pages to reassure potential customers and encourage other customers to leave testimonials.

Personalized customer experiences and support are a fantastic idea that can be tricky to get right. The line and blend of automation and human intuition can be hard to find, but your customers will appreciate you are trying and eventually succeeding. You may need help along the way, and the" experts at ListenTrust" are here to help you get personalization precisely right.

Get Started by Contacting ListenTrust Today!

For more information, contact Tom Sheppard, VP Business Development, at: tsheppard@listentrust.com.

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