Why building relationships is important in the Digital Age

In the past, business was done face to face. Nowadays, it is possible to build a business and provide the necessary services without necessarily getting chummy with your clients. How then, do you keep your clients satisfied in the Digital Age if you do not meet them face to face?

It is not surprising that there is a huge gap in client relationship management – even though everyone talks about the use of CRMs - often these digital processes leave clients feeling neglected. Is it any wonder that most people now prefer to work with small organisations more than they do large corporations?

Well, the reality is that your business’s long-lasting success solely depends on building satisfying business relationships with your employees, clients and customers. And why is that?

Good working environment encourages productivity

To build effective and long lasting client relationships, there must be an excellent working relationship between supervisors, management, lower level workers, actually everyone. A cohesive workplace is largely born of good working relationships.

Yes, there’s always competition and arguments. But overall, the feeling that an employee belongs to a team eventually makes them go over and above to deliver excellent results.

Luckily, there are many tools that can help with improving work productivity amongst team members whilst limiting friction. For instance, task management tools like Asana, Fleep and Google Drive can help make collaboration, project monitoring, task assignments and delegation easier.

Read more about other collaboration management tools here.

Customers have become entitled

No, I don’t mean that in the wrong way. What I mean by this is that customers expect to receive excellent personalised services. It’s the reason many clients leave growing or rapidly expanding firms for smaller service providers.

As a result, when they receive the same results from their service providers, they are more likely to bail. Now, we’re all for rapid expansion and growth. But in the process of growing, do the smart thing by staying in touch with your current clients – it’s easy to get carried away by all the new business you’re getting.

Know this one thing: It is possible for a rapidly expanding company to still have that small communal feel that many people have come to like and expect if the organisation commits to that.

Your relationships will keep your customers

Do you know how innovative companies evolve? It does so by simply listening to its customers. For this to happen, there has to be a collaborative relationship between customers and service providers in the first place for the providers to know what their customers want.

In case you were not aware, it costs at least five times as much to get new customers as it does to take care of your existing ones. As far as we’re concerned, this alone is enough reason to maintain a good relationship with your clients. It’s simple economics really.

In fact, service providers who make it a point to build strong relationships with their clients are likely to drive more sales, revenue and profits in this digital age, because in spite of all the data gathering and analysis, personalised services are becoming rarer.

It is smart to build relationships in the Digital Age

Now more than ever, business is becoming impersonal. People generally don’t like that. Think about it: when was the last time your firm called or emailed its clients and customers asking them what they think you can do to provide better services?

How many times have you contacted your clients to just show some gratitude for bringing their business to you? I’m thinking rarely, or probably never. If anything, most organisations only contact their client base when they have more offers and products to sell.

Whilst clients may not necessarily mind that, imagine what would happen if you were to make constant client-centered communication a part of your business. Imagine what it would be like to simply get in touch to ask them what problems they’re having with your service and how you can be better.

So, spend more time and devote some company resources to building and nurturing your business relationships. This is worth more than any marketing campaign and should be the bedrock of your business’s customer-centric success.