Customer Service Fundamentals Part V - Build Relationships & Rapport

Building relationships & rapport - the final of five entries on DMC's Customer Service Fundamentals.

Like all of our customer service fundamentals, this one is quite basic and it almost is self-defining in its importance. Who would argue about the value of building relationships with customers? Even for companies that sell transactional or commoditized products or services, having a solid relationship with their customers is highly beneficial.

For us, where we are selling highly customized solutions, we have found that the best way of delivering the highest quality services to our customers is to build a solid relationship that is based on trust and mutual understanding of needs. To an extent this really is just wrapping up the other four fundamentals into one - someone can only have a positive relationship with another person if they value that person, are able to listen, be nice and manage that person's expectations. The better someone is able to execute on all of those items, the better the relationship will naturally be and, most likely, the better the customer's experience will also be.