It is not called “customer service” anymore – it’s called “customer relationships.” This is what e-commerce has wrought. Consumers can search the world over for products and services they want, and they are pretty demanding when it comes to how they are treated by businesses. They can be extremely fickle and will only remain loyal to companies that provide amazing customer service.
Customer service is far more complex than shipping purchases in a timely manner and processing exchanges and refunds. That was the old way when shopping was primarily local or through catalogs that came in the mail. Relationships were not a consideration. Oh, how things have changed. Online shopping in the U.S. alone will be $200 billion this year, and around the world, it will be about $600 billion. That’s a lot of money for e-commerce enterprises to compete for. And the Internet shopper wants more than just the ability to make a purchase. He wants customer service to be fast, reliable, and to solve his issues quickly. Waiting on hold for a phone conversation just doesn’t “cut it.”
You Need Amazing CRM Software
While you are not ready to dump your call center just yet, you do need to realize that a huge chunk of your customers would rather handle their service issues digitally. They are self-reliant and like the idea of self-service customer service. And 70% of millennials and Gen X-er’s want a customer service app. You need to accommodate them. If you do, they will remain loyal. One bad experience, however, and they will leave. The right CRM software package will go a long way to retain loyalty.
Determining What Your CRM Software Should Do
More is not necessarily better. Many CRM software packages will have both things you need and want and things you do not. What you do want are the must-have elements that will work for you and that will retain existing and coming customers. If you are unsure about what you actually need and want, here are some elements that you really do want.
- It Must Provide a Simple User Experience – for Customers and for Customer Service Staff
Whether for your customer service call center or for customers who are getting service needs met digitally, a streamlined process for handling exchanges, returns, issues and complaints will provide quick solutions. Given the unique nature of your business, a custom CRM solution may be preferable to “canned” packages.
- All Customer Information Must Be Housed in One Place
One of the most frustrating things for customers is to be placed on hold while customer service reps locate all of their information. Likewise, when digital customer service is engaged in, being sent to link after link to get a problem resolved will simply serve to send those customers away.
Likewise, the sales and marketing departments need to have this customer information in their systems as well. It should include the entire history of contact with each customer, all purchases, and all customer service interactions. With all of this in one place, everyone can serve a customer better. Marketers, for example, can track the history of contacts with targets and the responses of those targets to those contacts. It can drive when and how those targets are approached in the future. This provides critical personalization that today’s consumer wants.
- Digital Customer Service Must be Mobile
This goes without saying. The best option is to have a customer service mobile app that the majority of consumers today will use.
- Focus on the Relationship
In addition to streamlining customer service and making it fast and easy, automate as much of the customer service as possible, allowing self-service. This will free up your customer service staff to deal with more serious issues and complaints.
Be certain to ask for feedback in a VERY simple and short format. You need to know who is satisfied and who is not. If you don’t, the dissatisfied customers will “trash” you on social media. You should also have a social monitoring function so that anytime your brand is mentioned anywhere online, you are alerted and can check it out. If there is a complaint hanging out there, you want to address it publicly, so that others see you are responsive. You need to be a company that cares.
- Have analytics built In
You can use analytics to learn the following:
- What percentage of your customers are coming back often?
- Are your returning customers coming back in response to specific marketing strategies you are using? (discounts, special pricing, responses to emails, etc.)
- Are there common factors for customers who are not returning? This can give you insights into what you should be doing differently
- What are the repetitive customer service issues that you need to take action on to improve?
- Are your customer surveys being reported well? What are the most common “likes” and the most common “need to improves?”
When you have the analytics built into your CRM software, you do not have to go elsewhere to find other tools to get the data you need.
- Automatic Rewards Programs
These can be powerful motivators for customers to spend more, but a lot of them are underused. There are just too many of them offered by every retailer on the planet. Customers get tired of keeping track and they just forget. So, in your software, build in automatic reporting to each customer of the rewards points he has earned and what he can use them for.
The other thing you can do is a partner with other companies so that rewards points can be transferred among all of you. You can then also inform a customer of what he can use his points for with other retailers too. This is, again, part of the important relationship building focus that your CRM should always address.
Canned or Custom?
Now that you know what you want and need relative to CRM, you can take a long look at the canned packages out there and see which ones will meet your needs. While they will all have the elements listed above, some of them may be complex and will not provide a good user experience. And this is what you have to be most careful about.
A custom CRM package may be a better option – one that gives you what you need right now but that can be scaled as your grow and want to add new features.
Feel free to contact us anytime when you feel a need for a professional hand of help with your CRM software development or maintenance.