Is the way your company manages customers affecting results? Your answer depends on the agility with which your company responds to market demands and technological evolution in the area of customer management.
Regardless of your business model, customer management is a component that needs to be very well defined and structured.
Ensure that your main focus is to create a close and constant relationship with your customers through the right strategies and technological tools to improve the daily management of your client portfolio.
In this effort to maintain and acquire new clients, it’s easy to fall into management errors that can jeopardize all your hard work. Here are the 9 most common client management errors in 2020:
1. Underestimating the total customer experience
Do you know the difference between a successful company and a total failure? It’s simple: the focus on the complete customer experience! A client may be satisfied, but it’s not the same as being fulfilled. Companies think that knowing if the client is satisfied is enough. It’s relevant, but it’s not enough! It’s essential to focus on customer fulfillment by monitoring customer satisfaction rates so that businesses correctly target their strategic loyalty actions.
2. Not using a CRM system
Does your company still manage customers through manual customer records, notepads, and post-its? This system could have been useful in the last century, but today it’s completely outdated by the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions available in the market. This type of software allows your business to have a 360-degree view of your company’s customer management, from dashboards, agendas, creation of alerts, integration with marketing campaigns, and among other features.
3. Not providing an efficient after-sales service
Once the service or sale is invoiced, do you consider your company’s relationship with your client complete? Wrong, after a deal is closed, your work has only started. After-sales service is crucial to accomplish two goals: build customer loyalty and get your feedback on the product/service and sales service. Thus, after-sales service ensures that your customers are satisfied with your business, and it promotes a transparent communication with your customer about the progress of this feedback.
4. Not promoting the client’s emotional involvement
The client wants to feel part of the organization and to believe that that brand is also his. Above all, he wants to have an intimate relationship with the company. To allow the client to participate in the process of innovation and creation of new products and services and give him the feeling of control is fundamental. Make the customer feel welcome and treat him as someone important to the company.
5. Forgetting customers
Customer loyalty is essential to reduce costs and improve long-term return on investment. However, this practice often falls short. Particularly when the sales team’s attention is focused on establishing new business contacts and old customers end up being forgotten, which implies an extra investment in customer retention or even a definitive loss.
6. Not solving customer’s problems (quickly)
Regardless of business size, the ability to respond to customers’ problems is critical to achieving success. Returns, exchanges, and guarantees are the most deficient areas of any service, which can lead to the loss of a significant number of customers.
7. Not knowing the importance of mobile
It’s imperative that companies always keep in mind that their digital presence needs to be where people are. In Portugal, more than half of users access the Internet via cell phones. Therefore, improving customer management implies recognizing that, today, mobile has become the rule rather than the exception. To improve the consumer experience it’s important to bet on mobile apps, creating a true multi-channel communication.
8. Ignoring analytics
Nowadays, it’s essential that companies take advantage of the information at their disposal and invest in analytics applied to customer management. Every purchase, commercial contact, or simple navigation of a user on your website leaves a “trail” of associated data. Processing the available legal data allows you to create more personalized experiences for your customers, focused on their needs and consumption patterns.
9. Not using the right collaboration and management solution
At this stage, you have realized that it’s crucial to employ the right strategy to avoid these mistakes and improve your company’s relationship with your clients. But did you know that there are intuitive solutions that optimize customer management? Airdesk is a collaboration and management platform with a 360-degree view, which optimizes the entire customer management process.
With Airdesk you can:
Categorize and organize all customers and business contacts that your company works in a single platform.
Import via Excel the data of clients and contacts you want to associate to the platform, quickly and easily.
Select what you want to import and how you want to organize the information. This way, you avoid duplicate data.
Report calls to your team. Make sure that each call is answered on time. As soon as the contact/customer hangs up the call, the problem is already being solved.
Manage the services provided by your team to customers. Assign the services to your team members and analyze how many hours are being spent. Assign customers, team members, and documents to the process.