Investing in CRM helps you understand your customers and make them feel ‘heard’
Understanding your customers and being aware of their opinions is important within any organisation: firstly, it allows you to keep them satisfied in order to retain their business. Secondly, if they are satisfied, this will typically assist you in getting more leads and hopefully more business in due course.
In this regard, a good customer relationship management (CRM) system can help you to understand your customers and keep them happy – or conversely to effectively address their issues if they have a problem. Ensuring that your customers feel they are ‘being heard’ is critically important for your business’s ongoing success and longevity.
CRM systems can help your company to log, store and access useful information about your customers, to allow for an accurate and detailed understanding of them. This is key in enabling you to communicate with them better and facilitate the process of allowing them to feel that you are listening and that they are being ‘heard’.
Understanding customers: business intelligence and profiling
An excellent CRM system also provides the business intelligence, profiling and understanding- which also allows your customers to be heard and therefore retained in the long term.
In my opinion, the term ‘business intelligence’ means being able to use the data that you have to calculate how your business is really doing – compared to relying on your gut feelings, which of course could be wrong. In essence, you will be using instruments, calculations and digital feedback, instead of relying on instinct or emotion alone.
Your CRM system should provide infographic information to give you real insight and a truly accurate picture of how the business is doing. It can also be used to indicate the status and ‘temperature’ of your customer relationships: for example, what your customers really think about your business and their opinion of the products or solutions they are buying from you.
Furthermore, with a solid CRM system, you will be able to find out information about your repeat buyers, and those who give compliments or complaints. The system will allow you to drill down into these figures – into the data itself – to pull out a real picture of what is going on inside your business.
On the other hand, the ‘profiling of your customers’ means being able to get a good idea of who they actually are. With a proper data system, you will be able to access various factual and objective reports, to find out who the decision makers in the company are; as well as their age groups, job titles, areas of influence and responsibilities.
Using your CRM information to make your customer feel ‘heard’
When it comes to dissatisfied customers, their biggest complaint is often around a lack of service: for example, your company sells products, and perhaps they have acquired and then had a problem with one of your items.
I would recommend that you create a pathway for the customer to be able to voice their queries and complaints around the product, in such a way that the issue does not get lost within your company. If there are no real systems set up, complaints can easily disappear within the organisation, and the issue could be forgotten. This sends entirely the wrong message, namely: ‘as our customer, you are not important to us.’ However, with a CRM system, this problem is a thing of the past.
By investing in a quality CRM system, you will be enabled to log customer service calls and make designated members in your team responsible for resolving the issue. At the same time, you will also be able to notify the customer that their query has been logged, and that they have ‘been heard’.
The CRM system will be able to send an email or text to confirm that the query is being addressed. You will also have various controls in place to make sure it does not get lost – with the data that is being logged into the system, you will be able to check the status of the response, and if need be, draw a report. You will also be able to schedule targeted customer communications to assure them that the issue is in hand.
As outlined, understanding your customers is an important element in giving them good service, which in turn ensures healthy customer relationships and potential new sales through their positive endorsement. As we look ahead into the brand-new year that stretches before us – waiting to be filled with good business decisions – why not begin with the decision to invest in a quality CRM system so that your customers will know that they truly are being heard, and can experience the benefits of improved service which that brings?