Business is all about building relationships. Strong relationships garner trust and loyalty – essential traits when engaging with current and potential clients, suppliers, vendors, stakeholders, etc. And if you want to build relationships for life, it’s vital to maintain the personal touch!

Don’t get me wrong, IT is critical in business to help you achieve high productivity, but it doesn’t replace an old-fashioned phone call or in-person conversation.

Personal interaction with your clients must be part of your ongoing plan. It is non-negotiable. It doesn’t have to be you, but somebody in your business must always be ready to deal with your customers in person.

Why is this so important?

Not losing the personal touch is essential for two reasons:

• You want to make the initial sale 

People do business with people they trust, and nobody can trust a computer. Some of you might work in customers’ homes. It’s a very personal space, and a friendly, personal interaction helps make someone feel at ease.

Other people have had run-ins with or heard stories about cowboys that vanish midway through a project. Part of your job is building trust, and that’s hard to develop with technology alone.

• Secondly, you want to gain lifetime customers and a continuous stream of referrals.

 It typically costs 4 – 10 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain existing ones. The little things in customer service often make the most significant difference. The personal touch will cost you a bit of time, but it’s worth the extra work and glowing testimonials you’ll receive. You can’t become the go-to business to solve your target market’s problem when you let every relationship fizzle out.

The key takeaway? Don’t be a faceless company.

Don’t deal with your clients exclusively through your website or automated phone service. Your clients don’t want you to add to their problems; they want you to solve them. Build a reputation for being a people-friendly business, not a group of mindless drones hiding behind a bunch of computers. The leverage offered by technology is excellent, but so is being human. 

Don’t deal with your clients exclusively through your website or automated phone service. Your clients don’t want you to add to their problems; they want you to solve them. Build a reputation for being a people-friendly business, not a group of mindless drones hiding behind a bunch of computers.

The leverage offered by technology is excellent, but so is being human. Being ‘high touch’ means that as potential customers work their way through your sales structure, they have regular contact with a living and breathing human being.

Please give them a number they can call, and make sure a person answers it, not a machine. Please provide the name of a customer concierge they can deal with and ensure that the person follows through on their transaction. There’s nothing more annoying for customers than dealing with a different person each time they contact your company.

Building relationships at scale – how do you do it?

That’s the dream. Grow your team to increase the number of clients you can take on and the revenue you bring in.

To ensure you continue to be in high touch as you grow, the number of customer service staff, support staff, receptionists, call centre staff, and all your other customer functions need to grow with it, just slightly ahead of demand. Don’t wait until you need something. Anticipate a gap and fill it at the right time.

The high-touch aspect of your business is also about making an emotional connection. For a chain of coffee shops, this could be baking muffins at the front of the store so that the smell greets people as they walk in. Or if you run a car service centre, have a nice reception area with a coffee machine and a full-time receptionist to make clients feel welcome. Please don’t make them walk into your greasy and grimy workshop.

In conclusion, there must be an element of high technology to achieve maximum results in minimum time. However, it must be about making people more efficient and never replacing the personal touch. How are you maintaining personal contact in your business? We’d love to know.