Customer relations: The key to business success
You can’t imagine anyone doubting the importance of good customer relations. But, if it’s an area that you’ve identified as requiring improvement or development it’s important to ensure you get it right. For different businesses customer relations can mean subtly different things, but there’s no underestimating the need for an effective system.
Hatch a plan
At its core, a customer relations system should track and measure interactions with customers and potential customers. This can include contacts, appointments, proposal tracking, support and communication with the customer. It’s important to begin by forming a plan and blueprint of what you need to include. Think about all the ways you interact with your clients, but allow for some degree of flexibility for the future. Think of the user types. Who can access data? Who can modify data? Perhaps begin by making a list of users and access rights. Managers need to see what is going on. Account executives need to be able to easily access and enter data.
Identify any areas of single point failure
Many businesses develop fantastic customer relations systems but fall down by not allowing general access to important pieces of information. There’s no point in developing a state of the art system but then keep customer contact information in an excel file on the sales managers computer.
The benefits
The benefits of a fully operational, functional customer relations system are far reaching. It can result in greater efficiency, increased sales and improved customer satisfaction. For many businesses once an effective customer relations system is put into place they find it difficult to believe they existed without it previously. It’s unlikely that in this day and age that you’d encounter a business with no thought for customer relations but it’s obvious that some are doing it better than others.
Ongoing development
Once you have a customer relations system in place it’s important to keep ahead of the game. Technology and the needs and demands of your customers is ever-changing and you need to be aware of new developments. It’s important to keep tweaking what you have in place anyway, no system is ever perfect but ongoing refinements will help edge it ever closer.
Call recording and logging
Call recording and logging systems offer an excellent resource to anyone looking to improve their telephone customer relations procedure. Call recording gives you the opportunity to offer bespoke training where it’s needed but also identify areas that work well or need improvement. Call logging offers an insight into the overall performance of the team, highlighting areas that can be improved and insights into where and when resources can be best utilised.
A trip through our extensive library of blogs offers a wealth of information on how call recording and call logging can be of great use to any business.
If you’d like to investigate the potential of our products please do contact us or give us a call on 0333 0022 440. We will be able to organise for you to receive a complimentary trial of our call logging and recording software to ensure it’s exactly the right fit. What more could you ask for?