One question trumps almost any other when it comes to building a profitable business: How is your relationship with your customers?
The current economic environment, is overflowing with options targeting the consumer market. This has lead to the challenge facing businesses is no longer about simply attracting attention. NOW, it’s about starting a conversation. Customers want to feel recognised and understood by the businesses they frequent. Almost as badly as business owners want to sell their products. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) comes into play.
In today’s crowded economic landscape, effective CRM practices have transcended from useful tools to the keys to successful business operation. The right strategy can not only satisfy your customers’ desire to feel important, but also save you from wasting precious time and money on misfired marketing efforts.
When you ask yourself about your relationships with customers – do you like the answer? – if not it could be time to make a few changes.
1. Open The Gates
A great foundation, for building long-term relationships, is making your prospective customers feel important; starting with your marketing messaging.
You may, often, feel as though you don’t have enough time in the day to nail your messaging and delivery. This is especially true, in today’s world, when customers are learning to expect more personalised communication efforts than ever before. Therefore, there has never been a more important time to understand your customer, their wants and needs and how to reach them. Capturing the right data can go a long way to increase your understanding of who you customer is and why they do what they do.
Having clear channels of communication can greatly improve how your business receives and records this information – for example: chatbot programs and support desks. This information can then be used to create automated marketing campaigns, for your business, capable of reached selected groups of people.
2. Use The Right Technology
Building an effective platform, e.g. Excel Workbook, to manage your customer data may seem more cost effective on face value. However, this method would require a significant amount of time and be a very manual process. You loose the ‘cost effectiveness’ as soon as you start building a decent customer base.
Alternatively, consider the many CRM platforms already on the market – for example: Salesforce, Zoho One, Keap/Infusionsoft and so on. These platforms have already been developed to automate a significant number of processes so you are then able to spend your time on more productive avenues.
From managing new leads, engaging with regular customers, and automated marketing. There are very few limits to what can be done with an effective CRM.
3. Manage Your Workflow
The new digital age has ushered in the need for speedy response times, personalisation and increased customer demands. These rapid and continuous advances make it near impossible to keep up manually, and your business can come under threat if certain processes are not automated. The time used on these tasks can eat away at your profit margin and gradually your business may experience a decline in the relationship with your customers.
A good CRM platform can take the stress out of managing this data and the many streams it comes from. These systems are capable of running your whole business, if you choose the right one. Making the move to automate your business processes, may seem unnecessary. However, it can lead to greater productivity from your staff.
By optimising processes like some marketing elements, how your information is qualified (good lead vs bad lead). And so on, many hours can be made available your staff to be focused on tasks of higher value to your business. The right management strategies and knowledge can save you a great deal of time and money.
4. Powerful Relationships
Gaining and maintaining new customers has never been more important. The market is saturated with fake and shallow LinkedIn connections that only lead to a sales pitch. Everyone is paying for ads and hoping it will turn their business around.
In the race to reach new customers, the fastest, most advanced technological methods are winning. There has never been a better time to invest in a tailored CRM system that can help you build a loyal customer base. If you’re looking for a way to simplify your business operations without losing out on the opportunity to create loyal customers. Our team has the knowledge and expertise to help you implement the ideal solution.
