Imagine that you grew up near a family-owned breakfast restaurant. Every Sunday morning, you visit this restaurant and Marco, the man at the counter, greets you with a smile and asks you about your day. When you move away for college, you realize that no other restaurant is as good as Marco's.
But how did that restaurant win over your loyalty? And more importantly, how can we be Marco in our businesses? This lesson is the first video in Unit 6, Customer Relations. Take a look at this breakdown, which shows you how often this unit comes up on district, state, and international exams for each of the different clusters. Hello and welcome.
This is Lesson 6.1, Intro to Customer Relations. Now let's get to work, team. We'll discuss two big topics in this video. First, we will define customer relations.
Then, we will go into the four benefits of customer relations and differentiate between customer relations and customer service. Finally, we'll give you three tips for building positive customer relations and discuss the role of the customer relations manager. So what is customer relations?
It's anything that helps foster positive relationships with customers. And businesses will build and implement specific plans to build and maintain these relationships. It's usually someone's job. That's how important this is.
Have you ever gotten an email from a company immediately after ordering from their online store? That's customer relations. Maintaining positive relationships with customers has four main benefits. Increased customer retention, increased customer loyalty, increased customer satisfaction, and increased customer feedback.
First on the list is increased customer retention. This means that customers are likely to keep coming back to you if you treat them well. Studies show that 61% of customers stop going to a company if they have a bad experience with them. This is a great stat to use in a Decker role play.
Next, customer relations boosts customer loyalty. This means that your customers will keep buying your product even if the competitor offers a slightly better deal. This is related to, but slightly different from customer retention. Customer retention is whether or not your existing customers keep buying from you.
Customer loyalty describes the actual relationship you have with your customers. A low loyalty customer can easily be persuaded to purchase from a competitor instead of you, which would lower your customer retention. Likewise, just because a customer keeps buying from you doesn't mean they're loyal.
Third, customer relations is critical to increasing customer satisfaction. We'll talk about this in depth in our video on the marketing concept, but for now, just know that you should always prioritize making your customers Lastly, customer relations increases customer feedback, and that feedback can help make your products even better for the customers. When you build a strong relationship with someone, you both feel more comfortable communicating honestly with each other. It works the same way with companies and customers.
A strong relationship means that customers are more likely to openly communicate with you and inform you of areas for improvement. You may not know this, but customer relations is not the same thing as customer service. Customer relations is proactive, meaning that it tries to improve the customer experience by sorting out issues before they occur. On the other hand, customer service tries to solve customer issues and answer questions in real time.
Now, there are three ways to build positive customer relations, which are understanding a customer's needs, needs and proactively addressing them, prioritizing consistency, and making emotional connections. First, a business has to find out what the customer needs. They can do this by simple observation, customer interviews, market research, sales reports, or any data that shows customer behavior. After identifying the needs of the business, they can then make a decision to make the decision. The business needs to be able to identify the needs of the customer, and then make a decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision to make the decision the need, the company needs to actively address it.
Everything you do in business should focus on providing value for the customer. As you bring value, whether through products you sell or relationships you build, customers will be more loyal and your sales will increase. The next way to build positive customer relationships is by being consistent.
There are two ways to do this. First, the customer journey has to be consistent. For example, every time you walk into a specific store the greeting the layout and the signage should be exactly the same think about every target you've been to they're an incredibly consistent brand second communication must be consistent for example a company's logo communicates their brand image to the customer and it always remains consistent consistency will help customers trust your brand and stay loyal the last way to build positive customer relationships is by creating emotional connections which is when you connect with the customers on a personal level think back to the market situation at the start of this video that is the perfect example of emotional connection finally let's Let's talk about the role of a customer relations manager. This person is the head of the entire customer relations team and implements new ideas for building stronger relationships with customers.
A customer relations manager should have people skills, creativity, experience in data analysis, and the ability to proactively solve problems. Now that we've gone over all the content, it's time to test your knowledge with a real DECA question. Pause the video and try to answer. The answer is C, offering to place all the packages in one large bag.
You know that the first step to positive customer relations is to find out what the customer needs. Find out what the customer needs. You can go with that.
Okay. Yeah. You know that the first step to positive customer relations is to find out what the customer needs.
is to find out what the customer needs and proactively address that need. The other options are positive ways to go about helping the customer, but only C is a proactive material solution. And here are the sources we used for this video. Feel free to check them out if you still have any questions. All right, that pretty much sums up lesson 6.1, Intro to Customer Relations.
Great work team and we'll see you in the next video.