Customer Relationship Management – keeping your customers coming back
Real Customer Relationship Management takes more than good customer services staff
True customer relationship management (CRM) isn’t just about how your customer services staff deal with your customers. It’s also about how your entire company deals with your customers’ information.
Of course, good customer relationship management starts with a good first contact experience. But what happens to the information about that experience? How do your staff record:
- customer address and other contact details,
- customer communication preferences,
- customer billing information,
- sales opportunity data, and
- customer complaints or other feedback?
The unfortunate norm – customer information silos
In most companies, each of these information types are handled by a different department. Usually the information is kept in different software systems or spreadsheets. But this leads to information silos that create situations like:
- customers needing to repeat complaints over and over to different staff to get their problem fixed,
- sending expensive promotional pieces to customers who have already bought (or said they’re not interested),
- wasted time as employees search for information stored in systems they can’t access, and
- mistakes and inaccuracies as staff retype the same information into different systems.
The results? Increased costs, sinking morale, and above all, frustrated customers. So how do you avoid it?
Customer Relationship Management through customer information management
Good customer relationship management can only happen if your company manages its customer information well. Good
CRM software can help – but only if it’s used in the right way, which means:
Want to learn more about managing Customer Relationships well?
For detailed information about how to avoid dramatic CRM failures, please see our
CRM White Papers.
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contact us if we haven’t answered your questions on this page.