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Why wouldn’t you love your customer? They’re keeping you in business. It’s up to you to set the stage for some powerful long‑term successful relationships by simply…showing some love.

As in any relationship, the need for conversation, frequent contact, and the personal touch, is the number-one need to forming a successful, long-term relationship. Love is visible. It is what happens when you care.

Creating the Love

In order to gain and keep customers, you’ve got to do more than introduce them to your brand, business or product. You’ve got to make them fall in love with it. Find out what you can do that will entice customers to come back to you again and again and bring their friends to you as well. Creating love in customers can help you spread positive word-of-mouth about your business.

Make it Personal

Start out by addressing customers by their names and focus on delivering a personalized service. Customers especially want you to feel their pain and to acknowledge their feelings. People are remarkably forgiving if you acknowledge how they feel and give them credibility. Don’t just talk to disgruntled customers, talk to happier ones also as they share their experiences too. It’s a crucial part of the relationship. Building the relationship is a big part of creating the love.

Spread the Love

The perfect example of stellar customer service and spreading the love is Amazon. Their goal is not to simply make a sale, it is to make every person fall in love with them and they are completely and hopelessly devoted to making sure that happens with every interaction with every customer, every single transaction, period!

Their financials continue to show that by providing this level of commitment to their customers, their customers have in turn made them the number one company in the world. They love their customers and the feeling is mutual.

Here are a few ways very successful companies achieve their love relationship with customers. They are successful because this is how they are trained, this is how they work, this is how they talk, this is how they treat each other, and, more important, this is how they treat customers.

• Extraordinary service — Part of building lasting customer relationships is offering top-notch service in every scenario — from the purchase experience to customer support, easy return policies to expert advice. The best companies to conduct business with make the experience memorable and pleasant for the customer. They are accessible. When a customer is upset or they have a problem, they want to be heard. And by that I mean they want to be heard by a human. Make sure that your customers can reach you and your staff to share their likes, dislikes, wants, needs, etc.
• Believe in the product or service — the best companies stand behind their products and service because they believe in them and they support their customers because they truly want to help them. When businesses are interested in helping their customers (not just taking their money), the results are more profitable in the long run.
• Listening to the customer — Part of providing awesome service and creating the love is listening to feedback from your customer and actually responding to it. They want to share their experiences not only with family and friends but with you. Therefore, talk to them as often as possible and never leave this opportunity to cultivate the relationship. Be genuine and retain your humanity. That’s how you compete.

Feel the Love

If you make the experience memorable, they will never leave.

• Be available when they need you.
• Offer world-class service.
• Be consistent in providing quality.
• Solve a common problem.
• Guarantee faster service.

The newsletter Quality Assurance Report states that only when a company knows exactly what kind of service its customers expect, delivers on those expectations 100 percent of the time, at a price that customers are willing to pay, while still getting an acceptable return, can the company claim to excel in customer service love.

To show the love, we have to strive for the best we can be in every aspect of our lives, including how we feel about ourselves, and how we treat others.

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].