One key player for any successful business lies in its ability to retain existing customers. Most companies especially start-ups that don’t have an existing customer database focus on attracting new customers.

However, Marketing now is more focused on digital than ever before. Modern marketers and sales professionals are in a long race of acquiring new customers and increasing brand awareness across newer geographies and scopes of business. While marketing and sales work as a team in growing the business with acquisition efforts, it is imperative to dedicate the same amount of effort and resources in retaining the existing users.

With the long-lasting drastic impact of Covid-19 affecting many businesses, non-essential businesses shut down entirely while even the so-called essential businesses had to adapt to a new market sphere by employing various relationship marketing communication strategies to keep up the communication lines with existing customers.

In today’s customer-centric era, relationship marketing is perceived altruism that entails mutual trust between a business and its customers. With more businesses putting the customer at the center of their marketing strategies, relationship marketing retains its prominence among various organizations that aim to foster brand loyalty and pursue brand ambassadors.
According to Forbes, a business is only as good as the clients it serves, and no business gets too far after losing the clients it has.

What is Relationship Marketing?

Relationship marketing is a way that leverages customer trust to improve customer retention and drive hyper-growth based on one-time acquisition. Having emerged at the forefront of modern-day marketing, relationship marketing is more focused on customers as opposed to traditional marketing which heavily focuses on prospects and new leads.

“Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time.” – Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs.

Why is Relationship Marketing Important?

Imagine if your business stopped getting repeat customers. Or, if your customers stayed but never referred you to their friends and peers?
Well, this indicates that you might have to go on a scavenger hunt to acquire new customers for your business to sustain itself in the long run.

However, according to Forbes, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your company’s profitability by a staggering 75%. Also, surveys prove, it would cost just 11% of what it would cost to acquire a new customer.

Every business needs to build “trust” with its customers. Modern businesses are based on existing mutual relationships with their customers. Customers want to feel part of a business and if you can’t keep your customers happy by creating a healthy symmetrical communication relationship, that business would most likely fall apart in time. Even with the best products and business practices, you will still need strong customer relationships to succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
As stated earlier, it is much easier and more cost-effective to retain customers than to acquire new ones. As returning customers have already established trust with the brand or business, they are likely to spend more as well as refer friends and family.

Why Call Center is important for customer retention.

Successful companies understand that a call center’s primary purpose is to retain customers so that they don’t defect to the competition. This means providing service to callers and resolving their problems as well as selling to them.

Yet even the best-run companies often find it difficult to effectively generate sales from their call centers. This common problem certainly makes sense when you consider that callers are primarily seeking answers to questions and resolutions to problems. However, for companies that optimize their call centers for sales, there are big opportunities for increased profits as well as greater customer loyalty

Optimize Your System and Processes

The average call center conversation across all industries is between four and six minutes. During this time, the IVR system has to function properly, and the call center representative must be able to address the customer’s needs. If one component of the process isn’t successful or if a call is simply not resolved, the chance of a sale going right out the window is high. One sobering statistic for any company to consider is that at least 15 percent of customers who don’t get their calls resolved will move on to another company. And these customers will tell on average five others about their less than satisfactory experience.

Before any company can begin to explore opportunities for increasing sales at the call center level, the first step is to ensure that calls are being managed as efficiently and effectively as possible. From the auto-attendant greeting and prompts to the amount of time the customer waits in an on-hold queue, the customer experience needs to be at a high enough level to keep the customer satisfied and engaged. Once a customer gets frustrated by an overly complicated IVR system or has to wait on hold for 10 minutes, the chance of a potential sale is lost.

However, Choosing the right Business Process outsourcing service for your company is as good as hiring the right talents for your company. DelonApps is a leading BPO service company that provides excellent business services to clients across the world. They also provide agile transformation services in Nigeria and own the top classified ads website in Nigeria, as well as a leading job portal in Nigeria.

At DelonApps, our services are tailored to meet your exact needs. While other companies have standard training programs and curriculums, We tailor our programs and curriculum to meet our client’s exact needs. Also taking our client’s culture and behavior and inculcating that into our well-trained customer service staff. This is one major reason why DelonApps is the best call center outsourcing company.

Here are 6 reasons why Telemarketing relationship marketing is critical to your digital business:

1. Build formidable trust:

Relationship marketing builds upon improving the customer experience and puts customer trust at the center of your marketing efforts to foster higher customer loyalty. To build this trust with your customers you must first start thinking like a customer and study your viewing, browsing, and purchase habits, depending upon what industry you operate in.
Assuring the customer your support whenever they need you and by whatever medium possible helps create a sustainable trust factor.

2. Solve mutual problems:

Relationship marketing helps in solving the mutual problems of both the business and the customer. Your customers are the reason your business can leverage monetization opportunities, hitting top-line growth. To actively listen to their concerns, what they like, and what they want to be changed, any specific pain point that has to be addressed and solved.
If more customers are insisting on one thing, perhaps it’s time to pivot. These insights help in iteratively improving your product.

3. Deliver a seamless customer experience:

Customers don’t just want to buy a good product. They want to experience the joy of purchasing and using a good product.
Relationship marketing helps you focus on the customer, rather than on the product or service you offer. It also helps in creating an in-depth profile of customers based on their needs and understanding what exactly they’re looking for. By adopting a more customer-centric approach and focusing on customer relationships, you can align your core strategies and work across teams to meet customer needs, improve satisfaction, and deliver a seamless experience consistently.

4. Strengthens customer advocacy:

In today’s day and age of unreliable paid reviews, your prospects are more likely to believe what they hear directly from the horse’s mouth; i.e. your existing customers!

Let’s face it – not all customers are likely to become super fans of your business. For a customer-centric business, they become your core pillars of growth. It is not easy to build customer advocacy and relationship marketing makes it easier for you. Once a customer starts advocating for you, they’ll become the most profitable source of customer acquisition. They are not just repeated buyers but gradually demonstrate loyalty towards your business.

5. Build a better product:

Did you know that 70% of companies that are considered best in class for customer experience rely on customer feedback? Repeat customers to your business bestow more than just revenue growth.

As your customers continue to do business with your company, they become more closely acquainted with the products and services you offer. This helps your company to get knowledgeable feedback from a customer’s perspective. Converting this valuable and timely feedback into actionable insights helps in building a better product over some time.

6. Lowers Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

One of the highest revenue churners is that of a customer’s acquisition. When you leverage relationship marketing and build some viable trust, and engage effectively via nurturing with a multi-channel approach, you can attempt at lowering your customer acquisition costs, since you only spend once on a particular customer.

The most recent software developers in the technology industry have paved the way for some of the highest-paying jobs in software development. From artificial intelligence to information systems and security, top positions for software developers are fascinating and highly rewarding. With the strong computer science and programming skills required, workers in the modern workforce can expect to earn excellent salaries and have plenty of potential for advancement. As computer technology continues to improve, the job market will evolve, providing new opportunities for highly skilled professionals.

As of June 2020, software development is currently the most sought-after category of jobs in the IT industry in Lagos. This is perhaps because there is a much higher demand for them than any of the other high-paying IT jobs in Nigeria. Lagos employers are paying high salaries because of the scarcity of experienced software developers in the country. Thus, when subsequent positional openings for software developers are put up on job sites these positions do not get filled up quickly unless new employers are willing to pay a decent fee. This industry in the country is therefore currently a seller’s market.

If you visit the current #1 job website in Nigeria – jobs.delon.ng that is focused a lot on IT jobs, you will always find different types of software developer positions remain unoccupied  This clearly shows there is a growing demand which is not sufficiently matched with adequate supply at the moment. There are many types of jobs associated with software development. I will discuss a few of them as follows.

UI UX Designer Jobs in Nigeria

User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX) job is one major subject I love to talk about. It is a type of job in the software development industry in Nigeria that’s been gaining a lot of momentum lately. It is however unfortunate that most companies end up spending more time and money fixing poorly created software because they did not devote adequate time to the initial UI/UX design before the development team started coding. No matter how gifted and experienced your software coding team is, they will always run into problems if the UI/UX was not perfectly done at the beginning.

The difference between User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) is that while UI refers to the aesthetic elements by which people interact with a product, UX is all about the experience a user has when interacting with a product or service. So, UI focuses on visual interface elements such as typography, colors, menu bars, and more, while UX focuses on the user and their journey through the product.

UI/UX requires a lot of collaboration with the customer and the challenge is that some customers don’t have a clear idea of what they want and are not ready to exercise the required patience to go through this process. The onus is on the software developers to not only start coding but also show and direct the customer visually into what would represent a perfect idea of what they want. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the software development company to explain to the customer in detail the need for proper UI/UX work before coding. As more understanding of this role is gotten, there will be many new job opportunities for UI/UX designers in Nigeria in the next five years.

Software Developer Jobs in Nigeria

Software development today includes mobile app developers, web app developers, and desktop app, developers. But because of the advent of cloud computing and the massive growth of mobile technologies around the world, subsequently, the need for mobile and web developers has seen a major increase as well. Most companies are more aware of how having a good mobile app and user interactive websites can affect brand positioning in a growing competitive market. So people talk more about mobile and web development. Some Nigerian companies continue to require in-house software developers to help with several customizations on their off-the-shelf software, there will always be the need for traditional core software developers in Nigeria for the next five years.

Project Manager Jobs in Nigeria

Project managers, scrum masters, product managers, product owners, agile coaches, and software development managers are management or business-related roles associated with software development. They perform best when they have a technical background but there are also many efficient managers without a technical background. There have always been project managers in Nigeria, but the growth will come from the new agile frameworks. More companies will hire scrum masters, product owners, and agile coaches over the next five years.

Data Engineer Jobs in Nigeria

Also, we have data engineers (sometimes called data scientists) who venture into several sub-areas including big data specialists, artificial intelligence, etc. It is an emerging field in Nigeria, but I am concerned that the professionals in the sub-industry talk more about the processing side than acquisition. There is still a whole lot to be exploited in this field due to the relatively little available database in Nigeria. There is not even definite data for censoring our population, crime rate and even real unemployment levels, etc.

Quality Assurance Jobs in Nigeria

Quality Assurance (QA) engineers are also not often talked about in Nigeria’s software development industry. Yet it is perhaps one of the major reasons why software products from the West tend to be less devoid of problems than local software products. For local software to become more successful, QA needs to be taken more seriously. So if you are a recent engineering graduate that loves coding but does not have the flair or skills in coding, QA is a good area to consider as there will be more jobs related to QA in the next few years.

Team building refers to the activities undertaken by groups of people to increase their motivation and boost cooperation. Many people use the phrases “team-building” and “teamwork” interchangeably. However, they are two distinct concepts. While team building emphasizes the creation of groups, teamwork emphasizes the functions of these groups.

Although team-building activities are meant to increase cohesiveness and cooperation, many employees don’t understand how spending a day playing games can help them bond. The truth is, how managers use team building in their organizations helps to shape their employees’ attitudes towards the process.

As such, leaders should seek to understand team building better as it will help increase their effectiveness. More specifically, leaders should be interested in learning the characteristics that make great teams and the techniques and relevance of team building.

What Makes an Effective Team

Defining the Primary Goal

The main function of forming the group should be made clear right off the bat. The best way to define this purpose is by setting solid and measurable targets. This way, every team member knows exactly how his or her work contributes to accomplishing the organizational goal.

Frequent Communication

Another aspect that makes up an effective team entails open and free channels of communication. There should be constant communication not just among the team members but also between the team and the whole organization. This way, team members will always have the information they need to undertake their roles.

Responsibility and Dedication

When team members are aware of what expectations need to be met, they are more ready to be held accountable for their decisions and work. Similarly, these team members are willing to undertake proactive measures to finish the assigned tasks within a given timeframe.

Overall, members of a good team are not only aware of the objectives, but they also commit themselves wholeheartedly to achieve the set goals.

Laissez-faire Form of Leadership

Another trait of an effective team is that it practices delegative leadership. What this means is that members are ready to take up leadership positions when situations call for it. This style of communal leadership fosters a shared responsibility, and it helps in boosting the members’ motivation and productivity.

Types of Team Building

Activity-based Team-building Technique

An activity-based type of team-building exercise gives your employees a break from the daily usual work routine. It helps the team to step out of their comfort zone. Here, the team members indulge in various mental or physical activities carried out both indoors and outdoors.

Organizing team lunches and company outings enhance communication amongst team members. It connects them personally and discovers hidden traits. Outdoor activities need the teams to step out of the office, which is not feasible at all times. Indoor team-building games such as a Football tournament or round table games like chess are excellent mood boosters too. This type of activity helps form or foster relationships and subsequently increases productivity/output.

Communication-based Team-building Technique

The key to every social networking is communication.

Perfect for a new team with new members, a communication-based team-building approach can be a great ice breaker. These types of group-building activities for the workplace allow the team to get to know their colleagues a little better and share a personal bond. It can help break communication barriers, improve interpersonal skills and build trust among the employees.

Personality-based Team-building Technique

A workplace can be a mix and match of all sorts of personalities. Hence, managers need to identify and nurture the various personality types.
Team leaders can carry out a personality test, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Then they can coordinate tasks accordingly to bring out the best in all the group members. It helps employees to know their coworkers on an individual level. They can appreciate the uniqueness everyone brings to the table.
Some may perform better working with a large group of people, while the rest may prefer small groups.
Managers can assign tasks according to personality types. It will lead to better understanding and increased effectiveness in the team.

Why you should invest in Team Building

To build face-to-face interactions

Whenever employees are asked to work together on a task, they often communicate through email or online chat forums. While this can be efficient, face-to-face interaction often has valuable benefits. Not only does it help to reduce confusion, but it also makes working together with a more social experience.

To foster competition

Nothing motivates an underperforming team to work harder than healthy competition. Most team-building activities involve different teams competing to achieve a specific goal. Whether a team loses or emerges triumphant, the odds are that members will be driven to give their best. This not only motivates employees, but also encourages them to apply this principle at work. Competition has been proven to improve workers’ productivity.

Furthermore, Team building is the process of increasing a team’s cohesiveness, productivity, and efficiency by coming up with activities that require members to work together. This process relies on a range of aspects to guarantee its success. These include factors such as good communication skills, clarity of goals, shared leadership, and a sense of accountability.

In addition to the abovementioned traits, leaders need to be careful when selecting teams. More specifically, they should pick teams based on diversity and skill levels. Overall, team building helps companies achieve goals and foster healthy competition.