How to deepen relationships with your customers

September 10, 2025

How to deepen relationships with your customers

September always feels like a time of new beginnings, even when we’re no longer managing our schedule by school rhythms.

So, it’s a good time to think about new ways we can double down on creating value for our customers. Let’s start with:

4 strategies that create real value for your customers

1. Map the emotion, Not just the journey

A classic customer journey map follows touchpoints: a customer clicks an ad, visits a site, adds to cart, and checks out. Think of the value you can reap from taking the opportunity to chart the emotional experience your customer has at every single step.

How to do it:
- For each stage of your customer’s journey, either online or in-store, ask: “What is the customer feeling right now? Hopeful? Anxious? Confused? Delighted?” (if you have any data that confirms your thoughts on this, even better!)
- Identify any points of emotional friction (e.g., the anxiety of “Did my order go through?”) and potential moments for delight (e.g., a surprisingly helpful FAQ).

Value from this strategy:
Solving for emotion (in addition to process) can create a memorable experience that adds value to your customer’s experience of your brand. It adds real value to their customer journey and can also help convert into sales or customer loyalty, This enhances your brand and creates valuable long term relationships.

2. Democratize customer insights: let every team have access to intelligence

Caring for customers is the job of pretty much every department in an organization. Product developers, engineers, marketing professionals and even the finance team are responsible to create frameworks that support customers. Giving them direct access to customer insights helps them to do their jobs better, and also helps to inspire them.

How to do it:
- Create channels to share raw, unfiltered customer feedback across the company (a dedicated Slack or Teams channel sharing daily customer comments, a weekly “Voice of the Customer” newsletter, starting key meetings with a customer story)
- Provide each team with a workstation that displays the voice of customer information that could make the most difference to them.
Value:
- When an engineer understands the frustration a bug is causing, they’re inspired to go above and beyond
- Each team has tools to solve their problems at their fingertips. They have access and can think out of the box, instead of having information spoon fed to them.

“Close the loop” for customers

The fastest way to kill customer loyalty is to make them feel like their feedback goes into a black hole. Act on feedback and tell customers what you did.

How to do it:
- When you launch a feature based on a popular request, announce it with a “You asked, we listened!” campaign.
- Empower your support team to follow up on old tickets to let a customer know that the issue they reported months ago has been fixed.
Value:
Visible action proves you value customer input and transforms detractors into your most passionate advocates.

4. Solve for the unarticulated need:

Be a proactive innovator. Use your deep customer understanding to solve problems your customers don’t even know how to ask for yet.

How to do it:
- Look for patterns in VoC data. Are hundreds of customers complaining about a specific inconvenience?
- Instead of making the small, incremental fix they talk about, ask, “What’s the underlying ‘job’ they are trying to get done, and how can we make it 10x easier?”

Value:
- You’ll be creating an automobile, when they ask for a faster horse. Think what that will do for your brand.
- Customers will be thrilled with value they never knew was possible.

5. Go beyond what you think you know

We often come to customer data to answer a question we already have. Which color does the customer prefer? What feature works best? But if you come to the data with a clean slate, you may find out things you never even thought to ask.

How to do it:
- Look at multiple VoC sources and decipher what patterns tell you
- Seek out VoC tools that uncovers patterns and reveals information on an entire category, so that the information comes up for you

Value:
- You may discover emerging trends or competitors that you never even thought about
- You’ll understand what customers think without the filter of your preconception

Do any of these ideas resonate with you?

We hope so! Read our blog for more ideas and follow us on LinkedIn!

Florence Broder

Head of Consumer Insights & Analytics, Revuze