Consider your customer’s emotional connection with your product, service, and / or brand. Once you make the emotional connection, it will open many possibilities to build and manage your customer relationships. Here are three ways to drive emotional connection with your customers through values, communication, and trust.
Values
Listening to your customers is essential to gaining an increased understanding of their values. Understand what your clients value; their non-negotiable core beliefs. It also drives their purpose, intensions, and decision-making. Your customers want to know what you, as a brand and company stand for, and whether their values align with yours. If so, that is the first step in laying the foundation for a solid business connection.
Communication
Your communication speaks volumes. It is not just what you say, but how you say it. Are you talking to or at your customers? Is your tone appropriate? Is the language you choose being understood on the other end? If you force communication, they will walk. Customers want to be engaged, but on their terms.
Building Trust
Your customers are watching your every move. They need to know that you will do the right thing, even when no one is watching. During the client awareness, decision making, and choosing process, there are engagement strategies to consider such as your interactions with your clients. Each aspect of the decision-making process requires a different communication and interaction. Make things personable rather than cookie cutter and humanize and connect. What you promise during the consideration stage of the relationship must be delivered, and it does not stop there. You also need an off-boarding strategy for your customers. Develop a way people can have their say, be heard, and your action steps to include their comments as you move forward. Transparency of how the data/information shared during the business relationship will be handled post departure. A follow-up communication to let them know you are thinking about them. When your customers decide to leave you, you cannot drop them like a hot potato. How you choose to treat your customers when they off-board with your company is paramount. You need a good off-boarding strategy that will keep them loving you and talking about you for a long time.
Understand your clients’ values, engage them in two-way communication they understand, and build trust from prospecting to off-boarding. These are fundamental elements to both establishing and maintaining your customers’ emotional connection with your brand.
