Building Customer Loyalty: 3 Keys to Earn Trust
In the world of customer success, robust, fully realized customer relationships don’t just happen overnight. Instead, they require hard work and mutual input from both sides of the partnership.
For CSMs looking to build strong customer loyalty with their current customers or, in the case of new customers, kick things off in the right direction, it’s essential to realize that not all customer relationships will result in customer loyalty. Instead, CSMs must make clear, focused decisions to build loyalty and trust at every customer lifecycle stage.
Here are three keys to earning your customer’s trust and building strong customer loyalty with your accounts:
1. Get started on the right foot.
For CSMs and their customers, nothing beats a first impression. This means that the onboarding stage of your customer implementation can truly set the stage for what is to come throughout the customer relationship. If you build the proper implementation process for the customer, work with them to ensure everyone is on the right page and moving along, and offer your team as resources for help (instead of roadblocks to what they want to achieve), you can build trust with the customer.
If you are looking to build trust with a new customer contact who might have joined the team after onboarding is complete, you can still ‘get off on the right foot’ by helping them get up to speed quickly and being an extra resource for them lean on.
2. Go above and beyond.
All CSM teams have processes and workflows in place for a reason. After all, it is hard to scale and grow an organization if your resources and people are bogged down with manual work, one-off tasks, and other menial items. But it’s important to realize that following these processes doesn’t mean you can’t go above and beyond for your customers. This is a critical part of earning trust and growing customer loyalty – customers must be able to trust you and your team to get things done and make their side of the partnership as pain-free as possible.
While this may mean making unplanned configuration changes or adding in an additional reporting metric here or there, going above and beyond (within reason, of course) will make it clear to your customers that your team is here to help them reach their product goals.
3. Be available and transparent.
One final key to building customer trust and loyalty is simply being available and transparent with your customers. Customer success teams cannot go dark or silent with a customer, no matter how little there is to catch up on. If there is an issue or product defect that needs escalating to the customer, it has to be shared, no matter what.
Customers will appreciate and respect the transparency and feel even more comfortable coming to your team with questions, feedback, and recommendations.
Want to learn more? You can access additional resources and content from ClientSuccess to help your team build strong, long-lasting, and loyal customer relationships here: