Do your customers trust you?

Are you thinking about how to leverage “social” in your business?  Are you wondering how to use social collaboration tools to communicate better with your customers and your employees?  Are you preparing to become a social business?  Most SugarCRM customers I talk with are still at the front end of this journey.  Many are still trying to figure out why social CRM is relevant to their business.

Here are some thoughts to consider. The social business is the next step in how we, as a globally interconnected society, do business together.  A vibrant, energized social business is one that interacts with its customers everyday across every possible channel of communication.  From store fronts to telephones to Twitter, your customers want to know what you can do for them and they will engage in that dialogue in ways we couldn’t even envision in the past.

But why should your customers and prospects look to you instead of your competitor who is just one Google search away?  It’s simple.  Your best customers, your most loyal customers, will demand to have a relationship with you.  They want you to know who they are.  They want you to understand how your products and solutions can help them.  And once they identify with your solutions to their business problems, your vision for making them successful, you will gain their loyalty.

But how do you build that loyalty?  By building a relationship with your customers based on communication and trust.  The first step in creating a social business is to engage in a completely interconnected, actively engaged, “always on” dialogue around your business.  But once you connect, how do you build loyalty?  By building trust.  You must become an open business by embracing  transparency in how you interact with your customers, how you build your products, how you create an ecosystem around your business.

Customers want to know why you make the pricing decisions you make, how you are going to educate them on new products, what process you are using for creating and delivering your products and services.  Today’s “always on” customer has a world of data at their fingertips, but what they truly want is to buy from somebody truly knows their needs and gives them maximum value for the investment.

Here is a simple formula for creating a loyal customer base in this new age of the social business.  (Hint: it’s nothing you didn’t already know.)

Openness drives accountability.  Accountability builds trust. Trust is the foundation of a relationship.

An open, accountable and trusting customer/vendor relationship creates loyalty.

Because you are now communicating with your customers on a global stage with every word recorded, blogged, posted and retweeted around the world, you must approach your customers with openness and transparency.  By embracing openness and transparency in this “always on” dialogue between your customers and your employees, you will create a successful social business.    Because never doubt with Twitter one mouse-click away, your prospects, your customers and even your employees will drive force that openness whether you are prepared or not.

–Clint