Building “rapport” with your customers will generally infer that you need to meet face-to-face. Although many marketing ‘experts’ say that advertising can build rapport.
f Advertising can ‘build’ on word-of-mouth, brand recognition and product identity which is considered the driving force behind sales, but rapport means building a relationship.
f Meeting a customer face-to-face, either within your organisation, at a meeting, lunch or a casual meeting requires you to have a basic conversation and draw upon social skills, which if successful is building a relationship.
Conversation takes into account a whole range of personal skills including respect, humour, knowledge, tolerance and charisma. Again, these are personality facets of building a relationship.
Obviously just talking to a customer one-on-one at a single meeting is not the definition of “rapport”!
f First time meetings may not bring any immediate benefits
f There is value simply in giving your time and attention to a customer which
may lead to greater “rapport”.
Once you have developed this “rapport” or trust you need to follow up on the “good vibrations”!
f Your customers would likely prefer to deal with someone they can relate to and who they feel understand their needs.
f Sometimes the challenge is simply meeting the levels of a relationship to complete the execution of the quality service delivery with your new found “rapport”
A close and harmonious relationship in which staff of your organisation understands the feelings of customers and communicating it to them includes verbal and non verbal communication which we have addressed earlier.
If that is ‘rapport’ then encourage this at all times!