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Archive for Customer Relations

Making Sense of Customer Relations

While many companies have Customer Relationship Management software, few companies know how to make sense of their customers’ information or understand what further information about their customers would be helpful. In this time of changing markets and needs, it is very important to obtain and use key pieces of customer information to become sensitive to their changing needs and to keep customers working with your company.

Customer relations are changing. Customers are not likely to want any more inventory than they know they will use. As a result they are buying in smaller increments and paying as they go. How does this affect your relationship with your customers? What information should be collected so that you provide customers with more value?

  • Make sure all contact information is complete. Not only is it important to get the contact person’s name and title, but you need to make sure his or her e-mail address and phone number are current. One good way to do this is to send an e-mail that is personal “thank you for your business,” gives a special offer on something they purchase routinely, and needs a reply which will verify information.
  • Identify your best customers. These are your most profitable customers. Certain key data impacts profitability, such as pricing terms, costs to serve, and products purchased. Included in this information should be data about their payment habits.
  • Use the information you know to plan and predict future marketing efforts. Based on trends and past purchases, it is often easy to plot trends in customer needs. Some CRM software will even provide such information analysis. Follow or verify information with simple, quick three-question surveys with your most profitable customers.

By using Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM software) to collect and manage key pieces of information about your customers, you can quickly identify your most profitable customers and learn to meet their changing needs.

Is Your Customer’s Call Important to Your Company?

How many times have you been put on hold with the recorded message: “Your call is very important to us”? Last week I read about a book called Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us by Emily Yellin, a journalist who has frequently written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and other publications. She knows all about the frustrations of those of us who feel like we’ve been taken advantage of. The review was on Brent’s CRM Blog and was entitled appropriately Is Your Customer’s Call Really All THAT Important to You.

Did you realize that Americans make an estimated 43 billion customer service calls each year? That means each American makes two to three calls to a customer service call center every week! And how many times do you make a call only to get put on music and told repeatedly “your call is important to us”? According to Yellin 67 percent of Americans sometimes have to “make a fuss to get a problem resolved.”

Ms. Yellin decided to write the book while waiting on hold one day in her freezing cold house, only to argue on the phone for hours with customer service at a home warranty company before convincing someone to come fix her broken furnace. While the book is written with humor, Emily shares great insights from her conversations with Fedex CEO Fred Smith and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. She talks about the Customer Rage study. And she explains what surprised her as she visited call centers in Egypt and Argentina.

Good customer service, according to Smith of FedEx is “baked in from the start” which Yellin says is much better than “just sprinkling customer service on top after the whole thing is already cooked.” Smith elaborates by explaining that his company spends an “inordinate amount of time asking their customers what constitutes an outstanding experience and what meets their expectations.” He feels that problems usually come down to one of three things:

  • The customer service person does not have the information to deal with the problem.
  • The customer service person has the information but does not have the authority to do what needs to be done.
  • The customer service person expresses no empathy for the customer’s situation.

It is an eye-opening account of how companies treat their customers, how customers treat the people who serve them, and how technology, globalization, class, race, gender, and culture influence these interactions. For example, Pablo who is a supervisor of a call center in Buenos Aires does not understand Americans calling to complain about a delivery that is a half-hour late. Delivery times and dates have no meaning whatsoever in Argentina.

The Wall Street Journal describes Ms. Yellin’s book as ‘an illuminating guide whose conclusions are sound: “The intangibles at the heart of each positive encounter remain constant on all sides: trust, respect, empathy, caring, and even some fun” Who would complain about that?’

Customer Relationships Across Multiple Channels of desk help software

It struck me recently how much more difficult it is to handle customer relations than it used to be. This is mainly because there are so many more ways that customers want to use to contact a business. Let me give you some examples. If I purchase a new gizmo and it quits working, then I  go to the company’s web site and look for a “fix” or attempt to order the replacement for the defective part. If that does not work, then I look for the “contact us” page which I hope will give a way to e-mail a technician for help or talk to a technician on a live chat. However, I have a friend who immediately picks up the phone and calls the company’s 800 number, expecting to get instant help she understands. Another friend prefers to just pack up his gizmo and take it back to the store where he expects to have the store replace it with a brand-new one. These are just some of the different customer relations scenarios or customer service channels.

No matter what business you are in, you are expected to provide several channels by which your customers can contact you and find solutions to their problems and answers to their questions. That’s great until you start adding up the cost of maintaining all those channels. Then there is the training of people who work those various channels. And the management of the channels themselves. And that’s if you only have one product to support.

However, your ability to provide multiple channels of desk help software and deliver a consistent, positive customer experience across all the channels will set your company apart and give you the competitive edge. What you have to understand in the process is what the customers want and what each customer is capable of understanding and doing himself. Each customer interaction – face-to-face, online, online chat, phone, or e-mail – is an opportunity to add customer value, improve customer service, or, ultimately to sell more goods or services.  Using a CRM customer call desk to this will give you great rewards in the future.

  • Customers want convenience, consistency, and reliability.
  • Customers want to interact with the company once and have the problem solved.
  • Customers want the service technician to know the same information they already found on the web site or typed into the service request form.
  • Customers expect to receive answers that make sense and work.

The key to better customer service becomes integration of the channels. All employees or contracted people who work to help your customer must have access to the same information and must have the same or similar training. They must all know the online sources of information and help. They must be able to access any previous communication the customer has had with the company. They must all have a step-by-step plan for solving problems that follows the same set of steps, so that a technician does not say to the customer, “oh, that guy didn’t know what he was talking about.” Both training and the company’s knowledge-base of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and their answers must be constantly evolving to be up-to-date and at each person’s fingertips.

When customers encounter freindly, knowledgeable people who have the ability to access the same information the customer can access, customers are more likely to trust their advice. Customers who use online or e-mail services have high expectations of those services that either end with the problem being solved or with actual contact with a person who can solve the problem quickly. When these are provided, customers recommend a company or service to their friends and are more likely to become repeat customers.

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