4 Core Principles of Customer Relation That Fuel Business Growth

Customer relation is a way business relates to its customers, clients and patrons. Some organizations hire people specifically to manage how the company interacts and communicates with people. The goal is to retain existing customers and to gain new ones by providing the best customer relation and client services.

Companies in all industries and all of sizes understand that customers are perhaps their most valuable asset. Improving the overall customer experience is vital for continued success and survival, and always has to be.

There are some core principles to relationship management that any company can and should follow:

Communication: Listening is just as important as telling. Think about how often you actually speak with your customers. Focus on less financial-driven communication (whether it’s e-mail, phone call or face-to-face interaction) if you make your customers feel involved, they feel as though they actually have a stake in your company, and feel like you care more than just trying to make sales.

Rewards: Every company should initiate and make provision for reward programs. It is a very simple form of saying “Thank you” and particularly it is a viable and measurable marketing tool that big companies and small businesses can use to retain their customers and grow their business.

Be flexible: Be quick and attentive to customer’s complaints: The objective of customer relation is typically to interact with the customers in order to answer questions, resolve support issues, establish credibility and nurture relationships.

Here are strategies that Improve Customers Relations and building customer’s loyalty, from simply opening up communications channels to implementing elaborate point systems that reward loyalty enhanced customer communications;

  • Providing customer feedback forms
  • Asking about customer needs in general when customer calls with problems
  • Training call-center staff to handle disputes
  • Encouraging a service culture throughout the organization.

Related Post

How NewGlobe is transforming education systems in Nigeria

NewGlobe was founded in 2007 and opened its first station in Kenya in 2009, opening community schools in the majority of Kenya’s counties, and becoming recognized globally for the Bridge International Academies model.

In 2015, NewGlobe expanded its community school Bridge programming into new territories – Uganda and Nigeria.

NewGlobe Education has been on a journey from proof-of-concept community school programs, to participating in national multi-partner public-private partnerships, acting as technical service delivery partners to statewide programs at scale, and ultimately supporting national government transformation programs.

NewGlobe has supported urgent education transformation for well over a decade. Its broad portfolio of programmes span Africa and Asia. Its model provides a turnkey end to end solution using cloud based technology and advanced pedagogical research that drives rapid improvements across entire education systems, dramatically improving learning outcomes for all students.

A decade of national exam results; independent studies and randomized control trials have proven the efficacy of an approach focussed on improving the development path of communities, states and nations.

NewGlobe has been keen on transforming education systems in Nigeria and have made giant strides in transforming community education across some Nigerian states.

NewGlobe’s achievements in Nigeria

  • In 2017, NewGlobe began a four-year pilot program with the Borno state government; supporting education for internationally displaced persons; and out-of-school children.
  • In 2018, NewGlobe started working at a statewide level in Nigeria; as the only technical partner to EdoBEST, a full-scale government transformation program in Edo State.
  • In 2019, following the transformational success of its inaugural statewide program EdoBEST, NewGlobe took on a second statewide level partnership in Nigeria, supporting the Lagos State Government’s EKOEXCEL program.
  • In 2022, NewGlobe added support of an additional Nigerian statewide transformation program to its portfolio, the KwaraLEARN program in Kwara State.
  • The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID)  contracted NewGlobe—as part of the Developing Effective Private Education Nigeria (DEEPEN) programme—to open new community schools in Lagos and help address the shortage of quality education provision in the area for low income families.

To further deepen its work in the Nigerian education system, NewGlobe are partnering with the organizer’s of Africa’s biggest education sector, TOSSE to showcase its mission in Nigeria.

How Likely Are You to Buy from Yourself – Thinking Like The Customer

Marketing your business has evolved over time. Apart from the traditional methods of marketing, one way to get a proper marketing strategy is by getting into the mind of the consumer. Let us do a little exercise to help do this.

Everyone is familiar with role-playing games. Let’s do a little role play now: You are the customer and you want to purchase an item or service from your franchise. Be completely honest, will you be willing to sanction the purchase? There are a few parameters you can use to evaluate this. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • How easily did I find the product?
  • How does the product compare with other competitors in the market?
  • Is there any benefit from further patronage?
  • How good is the customer service?
  • Does the product keep up with recent technological trends?

The idea of this exercise is to make you understand exactly the thought process of the consumers. This will give you a basis to work with a  better strategy.

Reverse-Engineer Your Findings To Your Benefit

After going through the process of getting into the consumer’s mindset, you most likely would find areas where improvements or adjustments can be made. You would find that you would be able to understand your customers better. This will help you to be able to tailor your correspondence to them in the future.

Showcase Your Product/Service At Africa’s Biggest Education Tradeshow & Conference 

If you can see yourself on the same level as your customers you can better drive customer loyalty and develop the trust that is so important these days and it humanizes your company and enhances your marketing capability. In the end, you will be able to anticipate your customer’s needs because you are thinking just like them. It will put you in the best spot to market with confidence.

uLesson logo

uLesson: Revolutionalizing the education sector

uLesson is an edtech startup that leverages best in class teachers, media, and technology to create high-quality, affordable and accessible education for African students.

Founded by Sim Shagaya in 2019, uLesson is now regarded as a leader in the African home-tutoring business. uLesson is available in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, The Gambia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Sim Shagaya, uLesson founder

The uLesson app has more than 2 million downloads, with more than 12.3 million videos watched and 25.6 million questions answered on the platform.

The edtech startup is focused on delivering affordable, high-quality and accessible education using technology. Speaking in 2021, Sim Shagaya stated how the startup is deliberately looking to design products that will meet the demanded needs of users across Africa.

uLesson is viewed as the startup aimed at revolutionalising the education sector in Nigeria and Africa as a continent.

The platform currently combines the possibility to stream its classes in-app with the choice to receive those lessons on SD cards. This dual option is one big solution to the problem of frequently-unstable and comparatively costly data packages which parents usually complain of.

uLesson helps lower class African parents access world-class curriculum-based schooling that could either work alongside the day school or totally become the tutor to prepare their children for top-level exams.

Looking to gain more ground, The edtech startup has partnered with the organizers of Africa’s biggest education show, TOSSE to be the headline sponsor of the 14th edition of the event holding in September 2022.