Investing in Customer Satisfaction

Winning new customers and keeping your existing ones is the raison d’être of being in business. After all, you can have the best employees in the world and the most useful and innovative products, but if nobody is buying then you will not be in business for very long.

How to deliver outstanding service?

So, understanding what makes your customers tick is critical for business success. What is it that your customers expect from your company exactly and how can you deliver outstanding service that will exceed their expectations, maximising customer satisfaction?

In order to be able to answer these questions, it is essential to collect relevant customer data every time clients engage with your company, keeping an accurate record of customer transactions, preferences, needs and concerns. Furthermore, in order to truly impact customer satisfaction, this information must be made available in a timely way to any company representative who is dealing with the client, empowering them to take the customer’s history into consideration at all points of interaction.

This is by no means an easy task, which is why investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is one of the most important investments you can make in customer satisfaction.

The benefits of a CRM solution

A CRM is designed to enable you to store vast amounts of information about your clients in an intuitive and easily accessible manner, making a 360-degree view of the customer available at your employees’ fingertips. This means that it will not matter if the customer spoke to someone else yesterday (or sent a message by email, or via Facebook or through any of the many ways a customer can try to communicate with you). Whoever it is that picks up the phone today will be able to continue the conversation where it was left the day before. They will also have access to information about past orders, client preferences and previous interactions with the client. This will eliminate client frustration at having to repeat the whole story and increase the chances of a positive interaction that increases the customer’s satisfaction.

A CRM solution is also critical to facilitate the sales process. Inevitably, when a sale is made there are various internal procedures that need to be completed. Quotes to be issued, forms to be filled, paperwork to be filed – work that takes time and can cause a delay in the order process. A CRM makes it possible to automate a lot of this time consuming (but necessary) work, reducing the time taken to get back to the client and ultimately to fulfil the order, once again improving the service given to the client.

A very useful side effect of storing all this useful information about your clients is the fact that it will be possible for you to analyse the aggregated data to understand important customer patterns, enabling you to customise your product and service offerings accordingly. You will be able to identify star customers (and reward them accordingly) or opportunities to upsell your products. It will also be possible to identify clients you are at risk of losing, enabling you to take appropriate corrective action.

The top CRM solutions come equipped with excellent reporting facilities, so you will be able to set up to-the-minute reports and dashboards keeping track of sales and other important customer metrics. This enables you to make sure that you can identify any glitches as soon as they occur, rectifying any bottlenecks that might cause your clients frustration and dissatisfaction.

Customers can also choose to communicate with you whichever way they feel is most convenient. They can visit your store in person, or send you an email. They can choose to interact on Facebook or Twitter, or pick up the phone and call you. Ultimately, whichever channel they choose they will receive the same level of service since your team will be empowered to deliver a uniform responsive service whatever the platform.

In conclusion, the main goal of a CRM is to help you to understand your customer. Gone are the days where different people in the company (sales, after-sales, finance) all have a different part of the story, or when you had to refer to different documents or spreadsheets to piece together client history like a jigsaw puzzle. A CRM brings all this knowledge together, creating a single point of truth about each customer. Putting this information in your team’s hands gives them real power – the power to consistently deliver a top notch service, delighting your customers time and time again.