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Better customer relationship management now: Five tips for cutting the fat and increasing loyalty
Tip #1. Promote customer self service
These days, customers have come to expect easy self-service portals for basic queries, like shipping dates or product availability. This serves—and satisfies—the customer by providing them with multiple options, and it also helps to cut costs for the organization. When customers are able to serve themselves through easily, call agents can to devote more time and energy to complex requests, which keeps staff headcount to a minimum.
Tip #2. Get customer feedback
What better way to understand your customer than by asking them directly what they want? Actively soliciting feedback helps customer relationship management and increases loyalty in two different ways. First, it enables the customer to see that the company is genuinely interested in them. Second, it provides the company with valuable information that can be used to improve the company’s offerings and service levels. Feedback solicitation can be informal, taken at the point of contact with the call agent, or more formal, through things like surveys or focus groups.
Tip #3. Gather analytics
Your customer relationship management software will provide you with valuable tools for gathering statistics, which can then be used to improve service and increase customer loyalty. In this regard, three types of analytics are most useful: service analytics, sales analytics, and marketing analytics. Service analytics shows whether your customers’ expectations are being met, while sales analytics give you the ability to more accurately create sales forecasts by giving you added visibility into your sales pipeline. Marketing analytics help you better understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, and also giving you information on the relative value and average spend of each customer.
Tip #4. Promote inter-departmental expertise
Nothing is more annoying to a customer than encountering an employee who can’t answer a question and has to solicit the help of other people within the company. Your customer relationship management system, when properly implemented, allows any customer-facing employee immediate access to information from multiple departments. Any question can be answered easily and quickly, without having to send the customer through departmental spiderwebs.
Tip #5. Maintain multiple customer channels for communication
You can enhance customer loyalty by making it easy for them to communicate with you. In addition to your standard, human-operated call center, provide your customers with other easy to use channels, like instant messaging, self-service, a web portal, and the ability to send requests by email. Once those outlets are implemented, give each one equal focus so that customers are never waiting long for a response.
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