Customer relationship management is often trickier than it seems, and it is also one of the most common areas where Statrtups get it wrong. Sometimes, it’s just that they are unable to understand the tremendous importance of actively maintaining good customer relationships in the digital age, and at other times, small business owners simply do not know how to improve their customer management.
Targeted more towards the latter, here are three pro tips for small business owners to improve their customer relationships significantly, with prompt results in business performance.
Speed Up Your Workforce: Eliminate Data Entry
One of the primary reasons why the customer experience team often does not find sufficient time to do everything that they can do to improve customer experience is because data entry eats up a huge chunk of their time.
As a business owner, you are left with the choice to either hire data entry personnel and increase your expenses or lose out on the actual active time of your specialized workforce, by letting them handle the boring, time-consuming but all-important job of data syncing between business apps and your core CRM software.
PieSync is a cloud-based service which solves the issue in its entirety by allowing for two-way syncing in-between most major business applications, connected devices, and the CRM you are using. Not to mention, the automated feature also eliminates the human error factor from the equation, providing every SME it serves with the advantage of time-efficiency, reduced expenses, and accuracy.
Redirect the Saved Time to Customer Care
Modern CRM or customer relationship management is not just about software, although the two have almost become synonymous with each other. Customer relationship management is about improving customer experience and business performance simultaneously, with the use of modern, smart tools.
Therefore, even though an advanced, two-way data-syncing tool like PieSync may help small businesses boost their productivity and time-efficiency to a great degree, the business owner will still need to redirect the workforce’s time towards catering to human interaction, enriching the true customer experience.
Chatbots and AI: Saving Money, Time and Face
It has been found that a lot of customer care needs can be met instantly by preprogrammed AI-powered chatbots. Although they cannot replace a human-to-human interaction for serving the more complex needs of the customer, they can filter out basic needs with quick and unprecedented accuracy.
For example, Amazon has multiple varying return policies on different items, and they have automated most of it unless a contradictory request from the customer’s end makes it necessary to engage a real customer care executive.
Small businesses are often skeptical about making investments to improve the various aspects of the customer relationship management process, but given the scalability of modern services, that really should not be an issue anymore. Ignoring the digital or the human aspect in customer care is no longer possible because to succeed, it has to be a joint effort by man and machine, so to speak!
Photo credits: eOffice