Customer Relationship Management: Weathering the Economic Storm
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Use CRM to Weather the Economic Storm
How can you keep the customers you have? You can and must deliver the best products available. You must deliver the best and most complete services and solutions available, but how can you do that? Start with Customer Service Software that helps you build relationships in ways that are convenient for your customers. For those under age 40 that would be using internet and e-mail solutions including web-based knowledge bases and internet chats and forums. For those over 40 it includes telephone calls with knowledgeable agents who have answers at their fingertips. A keyworded, searchable knowledge base will benefit both your customers and your help desk agents. The use of multiple channels to deliver information and help will appeal to a broad customer base.
How can you gain the confidence of prospective customers? First, you have to find prospective customers. This is the job of lead generation software. Then you have to keep them interested and you have to prove that you are trustworthy and understand their problems. One of the oldest tricks is through reliable information delivered piece by piece over a period of time. This is the function of a good e-mail strategy that is built into CRM software. By building a relationship with each prospect and delivering useful information related to their issues and problems, you will be assured of a long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationship.
A great and ongoing relationship with a customer will yield benefits in further sales and in recommendations for years to come. This type of relationship weathers economic storms.
CRM – Software or Strategy?
Thursday, March 11th, 2010Is CRM a Software or a Strategy?
Before CRM software, customer relationships occurred slowly — one-on-one in person or on the telephone. Someone said, “Technology does not drive change; technology enables change.” That is especially true of the technology for customer relationship management (CRM). Now that there is technology for customer relationships, there must be a plan or a strategy to go with the use of the technology.
What do you want to accomplish through CRM software? CRM solutions can help you get to know your customers better, understand their needs, and respond to those needs to create a valuable customer experience.
CRM can even begin prior to the customer relationship with lead generation and qualification. CRM software can help you target the right groups of people and the right people within those groups. And CRM solutions can follow customers through various purchases and upgrades to better meet customers’ needs and to build or refine products or services to meet those needs.
Your CRM solution must fit your CRM strategy. But if you don’t have a CRM strategy, you won’t know what solution fits that strategy. However, every business has a CRM strategy which is implied through its business goals. If those goals are only concerned with the financial bottom line, you will quickly realize that your company is not customer-centric, or even client-friendly.
Start by evaluating your short-term and long-term business goals. Which ones are or can be customer-facing? What do you want to accomplish in lead generation, lead qualification, customer satisfaction, cross-selling and up-selling?
Next, look at your market and your industry. What are the customer drivers? What is your competition and what are they doing? Consider how your company can differentiate itself from all the others through customer experience. Don’t forget to consider the impact and requirements of your strategy across different geographies, languages, markets, and channels!
Your company’s CRM strategy is unique – driven by your company’s goals, customers, conditions, and environment. When done right, CRM strategy creates differentiation across the firms of an industry. For that reason, a variety of CRM solutions exist and must be explored for their “fit” with your strategy.
Put “Relationship” Back Into CRM Solutions
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010Put “Relationship” Back Into CRM Solutions
Organizations should use their CRM software to recognize and honor consumer preferences. 77% of consumers say that companies should let them decide how they want to be contacted, yet only 33% of companies even capture their customers’ preferred method of message delivery according to Forrester Research (2009).
And only 14% of 4,700 consumers say that the ads they receive are relevant to them. Most consumers prefer a dialogue rather than a monologue.
The consumer wants to feel “listened to” and in control rather than being told what to think, feel, or do. These things would result in benefits for the company and benefits for the consumers.
What is needed as part of the CRM Solution:
- Automated solution
- Capture preferences including opt-ins and opt-outs
- Simple, easy-to-read results
- Real-time updates
- Campaign tracking and reporting
Let your customers tell you what they want to hear about and how they want to hear it. Information such as opt-ins and opt-outs needs to be captured in real-time and accessed automatically in real-time.
Benefits:
- Visibility into customer contact status
- Increase sales productivity
- Greater management visibility
- Significant cost savings
- More effective marketing campaigns
- Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Increased lifetime value of customers
Transform customer communications into profitable relationships. Achieve a one-on-one relationship with your customers.
When you have greater visibility into your sales activities with your customers and you have real-time access to the contact preferences of your customers and prospects, key metrics can be used to determine your pipeline of future growth.
Contacting a customer or prospect by his preferred method eliminates risk and maintains a positive, productive relationship. This results in creating value for customers which increases sales and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Productivity is then increased resulting in an overall increase in lifetime value of the customers.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction in the Contact Center – Part 2
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Measuring Customer Satisfaction in the Contact Center – Part 2
Using the automated survey tool in your help center software will give you quick and accurate feedback after each interaction with your customers. Technology alone does not assure effective post-call surveys. The makeup and delivery of post-call satisfaction surveys can significantly influence their reliability and usability.
Consider these 5 best practices based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index published annually by the University of Michigan:
- 1. Use a scientific questionnaire design. Asking if the customer found the agent knowledgeable and helpful in the same question will not give meaningful feedback and will confuse the customer who may have found him or her helpful but not knowledgeable about the question. Each question should only address one issue. And each question should be straightforward and clearly stated.
- 2. Define the goal. Know why you are taking the survey and how you will use it before you devise the questions.
- 3. Keep it short and to the point. Your customers’ time is valuable. Respect them. And don’t forget to thank them for taking time to answer questions.
- 4. Measure the right things with the right scale. Don’t give open-ended questions; word questions specifically and give respondents the choices you want to measure. Using a scale that takes advantage of the phone numbers 0-9 is easy for respondents and converts to a 100-point scale for reporting.
- 5. Coordinate your survey with other departments. IT teams need to buy into and have advanced warning for any survey initiative. Various departments can make use of the survey results, so make them available quickly and let others know how to access them.
Your customers have high expectations of your company whether you realize it or not. Surveys need to be constructed in such a way as to give companies ideas for moving forward and improving the customer experience now and in the future. Think of your customer satisfaction survey as a tool to help you take your contact center to the next level, one tier higher than that of the competition!
Measuring Customer Satisfaction in Your Contact Center – Part 1
Monday, February 15th, 2010Measuring Customer Satisfaction in Your Contact Center – Part 1
“Call centers have become obsessed with customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, not all of them know how to measure it.” Greg Levin of the International Customer Management Institute made that assessment nearly three years ago and it just as true today.
How important is customer satisfaction to you? It should be key to gaining a competitive advantage and keeping it. Therefore, you must be able to measure customer satisfaction and identify satisfaction drivers that need attention.
While companies are attempting to cut costs they must still keep their customers happy or risk losing them.
Did you know:
- 96% of customers who have had a bad experience don’t report it and 91% of those don’t do business with you again
- Dissatisfied customers tell 10 or more others who will never do business with you
- It costs 5 times as much to recruit a new customer as it costs to keep an existing customer
- The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, but the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%
If customer satisfaction is so important, how can you ascertain the level of your customers’ satisfaction. ASK THEM. Yes, ask them directly. And ask them within minutes of their call or e-mail to you. Feedback collected immediately after an interaction event is 40% more accurate than feedback collected 24 hours (or later) after the event.
Current contact center software contains post-call survey tools to capture customer feedback and enable you to gain insight into customer perceptions. These automated surveys have far lower costs and faster turnaround times than any other method.
In my next post, I will give you some best practices for your follow-up surveys.
Help Desk Software Saves the Day!
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
About a month ago I got a call from a client overseas. They were having issues keeping track of a flood of calls that they were getting from remote users. They had been tracking the clients in the past using emails and an Excel spreadsheet. Thus every time they would receive a call or email, they would copy and paste the email from Outlook over to Excel, or write the info from the call into the Excel spreadsheet that they had been using for several years. Problem was, they had to update the spreadsheet on a regular basis, and invariably they would miss tickets by not pasting the correct cells, or some of the help desk ticket calls would disappear when they pasted from one place to the other. After a short overview of Cynergy’s ticketing system, the prospect was able to see how easy it was to log a ticket in Cynergy, and keep track of it on the user dashboard.
Help Desk Software to the Rescue!
And, the client was able to see where tickets could be ordered in any way they wanted as well as escalated from one service level to the other. In addition, the client was able to see their customer’s information on the same screen without changing to their spreadsheet or CRM system. Thus callbacks were much easier and more orderly.
Then yesterday, the same customer called us for some additional training on our project management system. They had been using another Excel spreadsheet for keeping track of projects and their Outlook for scheduling those projects. After a short training session, the client was ecstatic about some of the features they learned about, as well as a much deeper understanding of how the project manager could actually save them valuable time without having to call each other on collaborative issues.
Thus, another satisfied customer! But more importantly, we saved them time, and made their job easier. Now that’s what I call a Win/Win situation!
Customer Relationship Management Around the World
Monday, January 18th, 2010The Genesys study I cited on Jan. 15 also has a version that includes 16 key countries, measuring customer satisfaction and the cost of customer dissatisfaction, and outlining some possible solutions to keeping customers and keeping them satisfied. The main purpose of the study is to continually gain perspective on the changing nature of customer service as well as consumer perceptions of it. This shapes the way companies deliver great customer service.
Surveys were conducted in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Enterprises in these countries (combined) lose an estimated USD $338.5 billion each year due to defections and abandoned purchases as a direct result of a poor customer service experience! Nearly 70% of those surveyed had ended at least one relationship due to poor customer service.
Consumers in Poland, China and Mexico have the largest number of interactions per year with customer service. In countries that have fewer interactions, the responsibility to make each interaction count positively is much heavier on the company.
Amazingly, there are three common threads to the demands of those surveyed. The first two are somewhat related.
“Don’t ask me twice.”
Consumers want better integration between self-service and assisted service, including voice self-service and eServices. They want to be able to start in voice self-service or the Web and get live assistance from an agent, and to start in e-mail and have better integration with agent-assisted service.
“Treat my interactions as a conversation.”
Consumers are demanding the ability to communicate across multiple channels. More than 40% said they would like to see companies deploy at least one new channel of communication with all channels being fully integrated.
“It’s okay to give me a call or ask me if I need help.”
When they are stuck on the Web or in self-service, 86% of consumers said they would find proactive engagement either a “strong benefit” or would see it as “welcome assistance.” The most frequently cited reasons for poor service included being trapped in automated self-service, being forced to wait too long for service, repeating themselves, and dealing with representatives that lacked skills or training to answer their inquiry.
As might be expected voice (by phone with an agent) is still the number one choice of method to solve a problem. However, e-mail and web combined now overtake voice, especially if the communication channels are well integrated.
Consumers overwhelmingly want more proactive outreach, with more than 83% calling it a “strong benefit.” This is the strong suite of customer relationship management software.
They want an easy to use interface for reporting or following an issue. And they want continuity from one channel to another, so that everyone is updated on what has been said and done.
Customer Service Can Be Costly
Friday, January 15th, 2010Customer Service Can Be Costly
A recent study conducted by Genesys in collaboration with leading industry analysts at Datamonitor/Ovum shows that poor customer service is costing US businesses $83 billion annually! Most businesses are aware that excellent customer service positively impacts their bottom line, but fewer than one third of businesses have any way of tracking or measuring revenue per call or how much revenue is lost with an unhappy customer.
Almost two thirds of customers end a relationship with one company and deflect to another company within the same industry, causing individual companies to lose $50.6 billion each year. Not accounted for in the survey is the high cost of another company in the industry to gain that customer.
However, about a third abandon the relationship altogether, causing the entire industry to lose $32.4 billion annually. While some industries are essential to the well-being of the consumer, others become “unneeded” if the consumer is upset with the level of service.
For every 10 interactions, the customer will end a relationship with a company! The average value of each lost relationship is $289 per year.
Two amazing numbers from this study:
- 40% of consumers said it is critical to provide more intelligent self-service to reach a human so they are not trapped in automated systems.
- 90.5% of consumers would welcome proactive engagement to improve their experience through extended offers or help during self-service transactions.
Conversely, 78% of American consumers say their most satisfying experience occurred because of a capable and competent customer service representative.
These numbers are staggering, but what do they mean to your business on a day-to-day basis? How can you improve? How can you keep satisfied customers?
Most people are happy with their experiences with live agents, Web chat, and Web self-service. Therefore, those are areas in which the current products and practices are working.
Consumers want consistency and continuity. Those are easily achievable with good customer service software.
Consumers want improved personalization. That includes proactivity and outreach. For example, if they are stuck in automated service for a specified period, they would love to have an agent break in and assist them or for there to be a “chat” button to click to talk with an agent. It would be even better if that agent already had whatever information they had inputted into the system so they would not have to repeat it.
Consumers want to be valued. They want their time respected and they want their issues resolved politely in a short amount of time. This might mean submitting a “help ticket” and receiving an e-mail with instructions. Or it might include being able to schedule a time with an agent.
Customer Relationship Management and The Company Web Site
Monday, January 4th, 2010Customer Relationship Management and the Company Web Site
The cornerstone of any company’s customer relationship management (CRM) is its own web site. The journey may be started by the customer on a smart phone, a desktop computer, or any one of a variety of other media, but the first point of contact is through the company web site.
Did you know:
- Over 90% of all consumer purchasing decisions begin online?
- 83% of customers use company web sites for service info?
- 4 out of the top 5 reasons for abandoning a web site relate to “couldn’t find the information I was seeking“?
Those facts should cause you to want to look at your own company web site through the eyes of a customer and ask some critical questions. Businesses can and should strive to differentiate themselves on service that involves the use of the internet. The experience of the customer should be consistent through all channels and it should be productive, informative, and in line with their expectations. Site design and static FAQs are two of the biggest roadblocks to effective Customer Service Management.
Site Design
Many web sites are not designed with a clear customer focused approach. As a result, customers and potential customers struggle with navigating the site, finding enough information, finding updated information, or sorting through all the links and FAQs. From the home page, a customer ought to easily find pages for contact us, help, FAQ, instant answers or chat, various types of support (hardware, software, parts, or whatever your company offers), and a variety of pages of information on products (or services) and what they are, how they work, how to get a demonstration, where or how to purchase them, etc. Make the links obvious and easy to navigate.
Static FAQs
Many FAQ systems are simply a web page of questions and answers formulated at least 5 years ago which are not really “Frequently Asked” or relevant to any questions the customers really have today. At least 1/3 of customers are looking for a single accurate response to a specific question or an advanced FAQ tool that will return an answer or a link to their question. At the very least, FAQs should be updated every 6 months with the real questions that are being asked and the real answers to those questions.
The most cost effective communication medium is the internet. It is not surprising that it is also the quickest communication medium – but that is only when the information being sought is easily available. Remove the roadblocks of ineffective site navigation and static FAQs and you will see your customer satisfaction soar.
Fast, Effective Help Desk Responses Build Loyalty and Revenue
Friday, December 18th, 2009Fast, Effective Help Desk Responses Build Loyalty and Revenue
Responding quickly and effectively to customers’ concerns builds loyalty to your brand. It is well documented that customers who experience problems with a company’s products or services to which the company responds promptly and effectively are even more satisfied with and loyal to the company than are customers who never experience a problem.
- Fast, effective responses show that your organization views its customers’ concerns as high priorities.
- Fast, effective responses eliminate (or greatly reduce) the time your customers spend worrying about or wondering whether their concerns will be addressed.
- Fast, effective responses eliminate or reduce the need for your customers to investigate alternative solutions or workarounds to address their concerns.
One of the most productive and highest-payoff applications of corporate resources is responding to feedback from profitable customers and addressing their concerns quickly. The moment a customer expresses dissatisfaction is the very moment at which an organization, through its response, can most influence customer retention, recurring revenues, and customer lifetime value. A satisfied customer will become loyal and will tell others; a dissatisfied customer will broadcast far and wide his dissatisfaction, driving business away.
Your help desk or customer management software is your first line of defense when a customer expresses a concern or his dissatisfaction. That software must immediately open a ticket (sometimes called a case) and notify the correct team or person to deal with the issue. It must also make it easy for that person or team to include other team members from across the organization without re-explaining the issue or what has previously been done. Therefore, real-time alerts and real-time collaboration are key elements to fast, effective responses.
Having a KnowedgeBased Software can certainly take a load off your customer support agents and make their job easier. It will also give answers to your customers which can certainly increase their confidence in your willingness to deliver world class support customer service.
Your software must have escalation rules set up and must generate a deadline for resolution in order to keep the process moving quickly and smoothly to completion in a timely manner. It must provide quick and easy access to a well-structured knowledge base. By tracking who has done what (and when), your software will eliminate duplication of effort and streamline responses to the customer.