7 tips for paying better attention to the customer
Customer focus is essential to the successful development of your business. One of the ways to make him feel enticed to come back to you is to let him know that you are 100 percent focused on him.
How? By using proven customer relationship follow-up practices to implement quality support and an optimal customer file.
OK, but how can you keep your sales representatives from having to deal with complex and time-consuming sales management? Be inspired by our 7 tips for taking care of your customer relationship in this article...
Customer focus: issues
The customer is always right, but it is not enough to build customer loyalty. It's about adopting attentive behaviors that show how he is unique and special to you:
- listening to his expectations
- being attentive to his reactions
- responding to his requests
What behaviors should you pay attention to?
Your customers send you a number of signals that it is up to you to pick up on: buying behavior, product choice, habits, preferences..... All of these are sources of information to be deciphered by cross-checking them in tables to get an analysis.
Why do a customer follow-up?
Knowing your customers better will help you satisfy them better. The goal is to build their loyalty so that they may turn to your services again, think of you for a new purchase or recommend you to their friends and family. This therefore requires a high degree of personalization.
Seven ways to be mindful of your customers: Examples
1/ Carefully collect customer data.
A complete customer record, but also the history of all services, inquiries, invoices and promotions are all elements of customer lifecycle tracking. What purchases were made, when, how and when after-sales service had to be provided, were there any complaints, and we could go on and on with examples.
In fact, maintaining contact with potential customers involves remembering previous interactions. Once again, the software is a reminder. On TeamSystem CRM, for example, history is stored and associated with each of the contact sheets.
2/ Optimize contact management.
To get to know your new customers, start by trying to understand them. To do this you need to contextualize: what are their problems? Their day-to-day reality? The information they are looking for? Identify a theme or problem common to most of them and try to pose as a pain reliever.
How? In your e-mails, for example, or on your blog, post interesting content-a way to interest your customers while demonstrating your strengths and expertise in the field.
Also read: How to improve CRM through emailing
Integrating CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is truly a game changing choice. Lead scoring techniques, such as the one proposed by Teamleader, allow you to establish qualified follow-up of your customers and prospects. It is based on the business parameters that are defined upstream. The CRM tool triggers an alert and alerts you in case of changes-a simple and effective way to keep abreast of your customers' news.
3/ Customize your approach.
The art of business management is knowing how to be precise : the right offer, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Difficult....It's about studying the customer journey to increase awareness and thus optimize the customer experience.
Satisfaction surveys, loyalty programs, offer personalization are all customer follow-up techniques to consider.
To personalize the relationship with customers, start by customizing your CRM tool to look like you.
Learn more about the customer journey
4/ Take care of relationships
Listening to your customers also means providing them with the means to communicate with you. If they need you, how can they get in touch with your team? If they encounter a difficulty, to what extent can they find a solution?
This availability, however strategic, can take the form of a support service in various forms: ticket interface, web portal, hotline, service number, preferably free, or chatbot.
But the customer must also be able to easily access his documents: have a dedicated space to consult his invoices and quotes, receive notifications. The company can then track interesting statistics, such as document opening, response rate, to adjust scoring and decision making.
And if accessibility is important, so is responsiveness. How long will it take for your customers to receive a response? If the delay depends solely on technical support, depending on the influx of phone inquiries, it may vary.
Hence the interest of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and forums. The community of users then becomes a force. And an answer, given once to one person, can be useful to all who encounter the same difficulty later.
5/ Ask questions of your consumers.
A customer satisfaction survey is a way to assess the relevance of your offering while demonstrating your interest in your customers. This is an opportunity to make the decision to reposition your offering, if necessary, and to identify your potential ambassadors by building a network around your brand.
Learn more about consumer feedback
6/ Initiate follow-up actions.
For good customer service, the issue of effectiveness over time is essential. It is not about solving an issue "once and for all." The challenge is to satisfy the user to keep him or her coming back to you over time.
Given the volume of your database, this is a difficult task. Unless management software allows you to control everything. Pipedrive is one of the most comprehensive tools on the market, with a very broad application ecosystem, including marketing automation features, to automate marketing actions, such as sending emails, reminders, without losing sight of the uniqueness of each customer.
7/ Monitor the situation.
Similarly, to reduce your sales team's stress in its prospecting, a CRM with notification management is valuable, such as noCRM.io (formerly You Dont' Need A CRM). The CRM tool synchronizes with sales staff orders, and the pipeline view allows you to manage opportunities and access history.
Why follow-up software for your customers?
The benefits of a sales management tool for customer follow-up
In summary, a CRM or sales management software allows you:
- the collection and storage of all business information regarding the customer and the company's activities
- facilitated internal communication and collaboration due to the centralization of customer data, for all departments involved directly or indirectly:
- commercial
- marketing
- communication
- billing
- support
- quality
- the fluidization of sales processes through access to a standardized and accessible documentation
- optimal visuals that enable team management, their planning, actions and interventions
- dashboards with a comprehensive view of activity, promoting better sales reporting
- automation of repetitive tasks (reminders) and key notifications (birthday, purchase, sponsorship)
The additional benefits of SaaS software, like all those presented in this article, are:
- constant updating of functionality, particularly to RGPD standards
- interoperability with other software, such as marketing or accounting software, enabling multi-channel tracking, so that important information is not lost from the customer journey
- mobile working
- real-time synchronization
Are you convinced then that the customer deserves your best attention?
There are free business management solutions available in SaaS mode, but be careful about ease of use and terms and conditions. Most of the time these are open source software, which you can use and configure freely. However, this will require a solid technical background to do so. Other free software is generally only available for a specific period of time or on a limited basis, such as in terms of number of leads.
Customer focus is essential to creating successful and sustainable customer relationships and begins with business development. It is necessary to have the means, both material and operational, of quality to offer them what they deserve!
Article translated from Italian