The importance of customer communication

Information exchange is one of the main activities of modern societies. The explosion of social media contributes to the emerging need to share, seek for approval and ask for advice. Communication between people becomes easier and more natural with the daily use of the Internet. Additionally, with the digital transformation affecting businesses, one of the biggest advantages is the possibility to be in touch with customers at all times.

A valuable business lesson

IBM, a company with more than 100 years of history, is notorious for its strong customer relationships. In a brave new technology world, where about 80% of newly founded businesses fail within the first 5 years, it’s a good idea to learn a thing or two from companies that lasted so long.

Gaining a customer base is certainly not easy – especially in the very beginning. Even more so, a company can’t achieve lasting success or building successful partnerships, if customer needs are not pivotal. If that’s not the case, it may turn out that the once happy customers are now dissatisfied – and one by one they would start looking for the services of competitors. Maybe you forgot to update them that you are going to be a little late meeting the deadline – or there are certain complications with your service. It may even be about little things – like missing an email with a small change request; but even wondering what went wrong that means you weren’t informed about it in the first place. This wouldn’t have happened, if you had asked regularly about feedback on your work.

Let’s take a look at 3 advantages of regularly communicating with your customer

• A change of customers’ mind wouldn’t sabotage the whole project

It is very common that the requirements change during the development process. Exactly that’s why methodologies like SCRUM help being flexible and reshape. It’s much better to implement changes continuously than to have a fully detailed project. By the end of any waterfall-driven project, for example, the business logic may need to change so dramatically, that the project restarts.

• Expanding current partnerships

If the customer sees that your company cares, this would highly increase his satisfaction. It’s very important what feelings and impression do your services leave behind. This could help for the future relationship with this customer and instead of looking for new partnerships, you could expand the current one. Finding reliable companies is hard in the first place, so if you have managed to establish a healthy relationship, why not try to maintain it and offer the customer to continue working together? This would save time and resourses for both of you.

• New ideas

While maintaining regular communication is vital for the fulfilment of tasks, it could also help generate new ideas. This could be especially beneficial, if the project gets stuck along the way. However, it is important to recognize that communication is a two-way process: not only should the customer express his concerns and issues, but also the partner. Discussing what bothers the vendor also helps the creative process. Ideally, it helps identify weaknesses in the initial vision and facilitates better results.

In conclusion

As a top enterprise software company, we put importance on customer communication, as it is vital for the long-term relationships between partners and also for the business’ reputation. Our company offers a streamlined communication process bundled with a fine blend of agile and lean techniques to overcome limitations of product development. We tailor partnerships individually and are committed to bring the best possible solutions!

If you are interested to find out more and discuss your ideas, drop us a line!