Why Customer Relationship Management Is Crucial To Business Success

There are many important factors that determine business success in 2023, but one that should not be overlooked is Customer Relationships Management (CRM). CRM is the process that businesses use to manage interactions with customers and is key for providing the best possible experience for customers and keeping them happy. These days, there are excellent CRM software systems that can help businesses to improve their relationships with customers, and this should be a key area of focus for all businesses. This post will look at why this is so crucial and how the right CRM system could boost your business in 2023.

Learn About Your Customers

One of the key ways that CRM helps businesses to succeed is by providing the ability to learn about their customers. CRM enables businesses to learn about the wants, needs, preferences, and purchase history of their customer base. With this information, companies are then able to find ways to adapt and improve to enhance the customer experience. When businesses are able to do this, they can retain customers as well as develop a positive reputation – this is key for word-of-mouth marketing and attracting new customers.

Improve Customer Service Standards

Another key way that CRM helps businesses to succeed is by improving customer service standards. With data on each individual customer, businesses are able to easily provide personalized customer service. CRM equips customer service staff with every interaction with each customer, and personalized customer service will help improve customer satisfaction and help create a stronger connection with each customer.

Make Work Easier For Customer Service

Following on from this, CRM software can also make work easier for customer service staff and increase productivity. By providing easy access to customer interactions, staff can quickly handle interactions without having to trawl through different systems and spreadsheets. In addition to this, high-quality CRM software can automate various processes and tasks to increase efficiency and improve collaboration between different departments.

Improve Sales & Marketing

CRM software is important for customer service, but it can also be used to improve sales and marketing. CRM allows the sales department to close deals by using data to follow up on leads and prioritize prospects and increase conversion rates. Marketing strategies can be optimized by creating targeted marketing campaigns, customer personas, segmenting their customer base, and establishing trends and patterns.

How To Get The Most Out Of CRM

It is clear that CRM can help a business to succeed in a few ways, but how can you get the most out of CRM? It is worth using the services of a CRM consulting company that will be able to use data and analytics to improve all aspects of your CRM. This can include improving the customer experience and customer service standards, boosting sales, and developing the best marketing strategies to attract new customers to your business

CRM can have a huge impact on the success of any business in 2023, and it should be a key area of focus. When you prioritize CRM, you can attract and retain customers and develop a positive reputation that will help your business to stand out from the crowd.

Improve Customer Service: 8 Secrets to Positive Strategy Few Know About

The secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well. A secret? No, not really. Small things? Yes, certainly. Sometimes small actions or even inactions by a business can have the ability to improve customer service. And it is usually due to a lack of an explicit consumer experience strategy.

Related: 10 Laws of Customer Experience Design

Companies lose customers for a variety of reasons, some of which they never discover. Sometimes customers walk away after a single unpleasant experience.

Other times they’re frustrated by a series of small perceived problems. Is a lack of a customer experience strategy costing your company customers? Do you know the answer? It is not rocket science, is it? It is a key secret to your success, however.

Before we continue, let me ask you a question.

What works best for customer experience design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by our readers and us.

With the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

The truth is, it usually takes significantly more time and energy to find new customers than it does to lose them. So you can be sure a strategy to build a positive customer experience can pay off when done well. All the marketing in the world cannot make up the damage when it is done poorly or ignored.

Customers today interact with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touch points and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.

If one considers the hundreds of interactions each client has throughout his/her life cycle with a company, how do you define a client experience to focus their limited resources? Here are some priorities to consider:

Set Customer Segment Targets

Always start by asking: For which segments? Although this may sound obvious, when striving to improve customer experience, it is critical to define the segments in the marketplace that you want your business to focus on.

Map the Consumer Experience Steps

Define the steps of the consumer journey. Remember to think of the entire trip, not just the steps your company is involved in. For example, for the home movie entertainment businesses, these steps would be: define the occasion, select a title, get, watch, and return the film. Mapping these steps for each of your priority segments is important.

Also necessary for each step of the journey is to understand the time spent, the activities performed, the criteria used to make a decision and move to the next phase of the journey. And finally defining how to make each step as short and easy as possible.

Understand Influencers

Define the categories of influencers at each step of the journey. Touchpoints are opportunities to intersect with and influence the customer experience. In the home entertainment example, the influencers would be self, retailers, external resources, friends, family members, and movie studios.

Remember that the activities performed by a consumer fit at the intersection of an influencer with each step of the journey. For example, a customer may go to Netflix and view recommendations and retailers would be the influencer.

In this example, providing online recommendations that are trusted would be the touch-point. For each priority segment, understanding the relative importance of various influencers by steps of the consumer journey is the key to success.

Customer service tips … experiment with collaboration

An efficient way of ensuring that experiences meet customers’ needs is to bring customers and frontline employees into the design process through collaboration. And yes, in our opinion many customers would welcome this approach.

When they are face-to-face with a design team, customers can provide valuable input, including firsthand accounts of what they want seeds of ideas to build upon, and feedback for real-time prototyping.

In a single-day workshop, the Fidelity Charitable team gave employees just one hour to create pen-and-paper prototypes for ideas that they thought would fill a particular donor need. Customers then joined the group for a mocked-up fundraising cocktail party that enabled them to test out the prototypes in a realistic setting.

Through this process, the Fidelity Charitable team got multiple rounds of feedback that focused its work on the most valuable solutions. Intuit has likewise embraced a hybrid of design thinking and “lean startup” to do rapid experimentation and prototyping across the organization

Types of customer service … align customer-facing employees

The quality of customer experience depends on a complex interdependent set of employees, partners, processes, policies, and technology. Firms like USAA, Apple, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels are companies that do an excellent job of orchestrating across their enterprise.

USAA has identified approximately 100 important experiences associated with customer business engagements like buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad, all of which have owners and cross-functional teams responsible for detailed customer processes.

For one of those car buying experiences, the company manages auto dealership relationships on behalf of clients, understanding that customer hesitation haggling with dealers for pricing slows its ability to provide loans and sell insurance.

Act on customer signals

Your client insights are essential to this effort. We’re not talking just satisfaction surveys—good customer understanding doesn’t come just from spreadsheets and data crunching.

Instead, we’re talking about consumer sentiments and needs through detailed customer observation, listening and relationship building. Social skills that identify and shares unspoken or latent needs. A process of gaining useful insights and then acting on them.

Experimenting at first and then full ahead. Having a governance mechanism to work on ideas is critical…otherwise, there will be no positive change.

Improve customer service … activate improvements

Now for the most important touch points, you could generate ideas for improvement. In the example above, an activation idea could be to develop a studio agnostic website that incents consumers to state their preferences, tracks their viewership, and accordingly makes highly relevant recommendations for what to watch next.

After you have implemented this framework for the first time, it will yield recommendations for what data to collect and at which critical touch points, and what types of analyses and metrics are needed to improve the customer experience.

Improve customer service … final customer experience example

Want to know one of the most efficient ways Zappos has found to create reciprocity with their clients? And create customer experience differentiation at the same time?

Surprise them!

People like getting things for free and like them, even more, when they are viewed as “favors,” but they love receiving these favors as surprises.

For instance, did you know that Zappos automatically upgrades all purchases to priority shipping … without so much as even a mention of the sales or checkout page?

Why offer this sort of benefit without mentioning it?

Pure: A company like Zappos, a business leader in customer service, recognizes the benefits of surprising people with a next day delivery. That’s not even mentioning the fact that this shipping creates immense goodwill between Zappos and their first-time buyers.

That kind of reciprocity is justified by almost any cost, and the hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

The bottom line

What’s missing is the concept of service. The desire to help clients achieve their goals rather than to assume you know what their goals should be. Talk about direct response metrics won’t help a client whose brand awareness is trailing by ten points.

Interestingly, top digital players like Yahoo! and Google do understand this. However, many in the industry are still the same arrogant bunch that went down in the first dotcom boom and will surely go down again, screaming “nobody gets it!” along the way.

Like this story? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements

10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence

To Improve Customer Service, Find the Best in Your Industry to Follow

It makes sense that if you improve customer service, you will increase customer loyalty. But improving customer service is not necessarily easy. It takes more than a seminar or a motivational speaker. It takes effort and time to make a sustainable improvement in the level of service you deliver your customers.

Not long ago I was talking with a friend about customer service. Among the many good ideas he mentioned to improve customer service, one stood out. He said, “If you want to improve customer service in your company, get a role model.” So with thanks to my friend for his thought starter, here are some suggestions on how to find (or create) a service model in your company.

Almost every business has someone who stands out in how they care for customers. They care about people and it shows. They always take an extra step or two for their customers. They’re friendly, courteous, warm, patient, and knowledgeable about what your company does. They listen well and they are focused on helping customers get what they want. They follow through and they follow up.

They are the people your customers ask for when they come back. And they’re the employees your customers write letters about, telling you how wonderful they are.

These are people you want others to emulate. Your first step is to define what you want in your business service. What personality traits and behaviors do you want in your people? Then prioritize them (because you’ll never get them all). Paint a picture of your ideal employee, from your customer’s perspective. These are your standards.

You should include employees and customers in this process. Get their input. Ask them to share their views on what they should expect from your company. They will give you an incredible amount of valuable information.

Step two, watch, listen, and learn. Pay attention to your employees as they take care of your customers. Watch what they do and how they do it.

As you do this, remember the ideal employee profile you created in step one. Make notes of how various employees measure against your standards. Then list these employees and rank them.

If you have one employee who is a perfect (or almost perfect) fit great. You have your first model. If not, pick a couple who offer the best match. Make sure the people you select cover all the standards you created earlier. This way you will be able to model all the important aspects of service to the rest of your employees.

If you don’t have any employees who come close to meeting your standards, then you need to think about adding or replacing staff.

Once you have one or more models, you then need to find ways to transfer their Amazing Service behaviors to the rest of your employees. Here are some suggestions.

Publish your service standards.

Print, distribute, and post your service standards. Make sure all your employees know what they are and what they mean. If you want great results, let your customers know what your service standards are too. Use them to make a statement about what they can expect from your company.

Use posters, emails, flyers. Make laminated cards to give to every employee. Put them on customer receipts, signs, menus, brochures, websites – anywhere your customers and employees will see them

Record your models in action.

Use audio or video to record your service models working with customers. Show these in staff meetings on a regular and consistent basis.

Highlight when and how the employee is doing things that meet or exceed your Amazing Service standards. Note: avoid focusing on what they do wrong in these sessions. No one likes to get criticized by a group of their peers. It will make the process less effective.

Have regular coaching sessions

Schedule regular meetings with your staff to coach them to your service standards. Use role-playing as a coaching tool in these sessions. Pick one standard for each meeting.

Prepare several staff before the meeting to play the parts. Let them know you’re serious about using it as a tool for improvement. Make it fun but useful.

Reward employees who deliver the best service

Set up a program to reward and recognize employees who are “caught” delivering the best service. Create ways to acknowledge their efforts publicly. Give prizes, plaques, or other incentives to employees who demonstrate the service standards you are looking for.

Reward employees for noticing when other employees deliver great service.

This is key. As an owner or manager, you can’t be everywhere, so you need to engage all your employees to help. Develop ways to reward employees for observing and “turning in” other employees who deliver great service. If employees are looking for the best service, it means they’re thinking about it.

Plus, it means they’re engaged in the process. To observe a fellow employee delivering the best service, they need to know what it is. They need to understand your standards.

Involve your customers.

Engaging employees to observe and report Amazing Service is good. Getting customers to do it is great. Find ways to get them involved in the process.

Let them know what your standards are and encourage them to nominate employees for recognition and rewards. Make it easy for them to do this. The more engaged your customers are in this, the more loyal they will be.

The bottom line

When we think of improving customer service, we usually think of training. But that will only take us so far. To have a measurable and sustainable improvement, you need to focus on it constantly.

Finding and using role models is an effective way to do this. Try this for 60 days and you’ll see a significant improvement in the quality of your customer service.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 2019-10-30_0829.png

Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Related: 10 Laws of Customer Experience Design

Companies lose customers for a variety of reasons, some of which they never discover. Sometimes customers walk away after a single unpleasant experience.

Other times they’re frustrated by a series of small perceived problems. Is a lack of a customer experience strategy costing your company customers? Do you know the answer? It is not rocket science, is it? It is a key secret to your success, however.

Before we continue, let me ask you a question.

What works best for customer experience design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by our readers and us.

With the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

Customers today interact with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touch points and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.

If one considers the hundreds of interactions each client has throughout his/her life cycle with a company, how do you define a client experience to focus their limited resources? Here are some priorities to consider:

Set Customer Segment Targets

Always start by asking: For which segments? Although this may sound obvious, when striving to improve customer experience, it is critical to define the segments in the marketplace that you want your business to focus on.

Map the Consumer Experience Steps

Also necessary for each step of the journey is to understand the time spent, the activities performed, the criteria used to make a decision and move to the next phase of the journey. And finally defining how to make each step as short and easy as possible.

Understand Influencers

Define the categories of influencers at each step of the journey. Touchpoints are opportunities to intersect with and influence the customer experience. In the home entertainment example, the influencers would be self, retailers, external resources, friends, family members, and movie studios.

Remember that the activities performed by a consumer fit at the intersection of an influencer with each step of the journey. For example, a customer may go to Netflix and view recommendations and retailers would be the influencer.

In this example, providing online recommendations that are trusted would be the touch-point. For each priority segment, understanding the relative importance of various influencers by steps of the consumer journey is the key to success.

Customer service tips … experiment with collaboration

An efficient way of ensuring that experiences meet customers’ needs is to bring customers and frontline employees into the design process through collaboration. And yes, in our opinion many customers would welcome this approach.

When they are face-to-face with a design team, customers can provide valuable input, including firsthand accounts of what they want seeds of ideas to build upon, and feedback for real-time prototyping.

Through this process, the Fidelity Charitable team got multiple rounds of feedback that focused its work on the most valuable solutions. Intuit has likewise embraced a hybrid of design thinking and “lean startup” to do rapid experimentation and prototyping across the organization

Types of customer service … align customer-facing employees

The quality of customer experience depends on a complex interdependent set of employees, partners, processes, policies, and technology. Firms like USAA, Apple, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels are companies that do an excellent job of orchestrating across their enterprise.

USAA has identified approximately 100 important experiences associated with customer business engagements like buying a car or preparing to deploy abroad, all of which have owners and cross-functional teams responsible for detailed customer processes.

For one of those car buying experiences, the company manages auto dealership relationships on behalf of clients, understanding that customer hesitation haggling with dealers for pricing slows its ability to provide loans and sell insurance.

Act on customer signals

Your client insights are essential to this effort. We’re not talking just satisfaction surveys—good customer understanding doesn’t come just from spreadsheets and data crunching.

Instead, we’re talking about consumer sentiments and needs through detailed customer observation, listening and relationship building. Social skills that identify and shares unspoken or latent needs. A process of gaining useful insights and then acting on them.

Experimenting at first and then full ahead. Having a governance mechanism to work on ideas is critical…otherwise, there will be no positive change.

Improve customer service … activate improvements

After you have implemented this framework for the first time, it will yield recommendations for what data to collect and at which critical touch points, and what types of analyses and metrics are needed to improve the customer experience.

Improve customer service … final customer experience example

Want to know one of the most efficient ways Zappos has found to create reciprocity with their clients? And create customer experience differentiation at the same time?

Surprise them!

People like getting things for free and like them, even more, when they are viewed as “favors,” but they love receiving these favors as surprises.

For instance, did you know that Zappos automatically upgrades all purchases to priority shipping … without so much as even a mention of the sales or checkout page?

Why offer this sort of benefit without mentioning it?

Pure: A company like Zappos, a business leader in customer service, recognizes the benefits of surprising people with a next day delivery. That’s not even mentioning the fact that this shipping creates immense goodwill between Zappos and their first-time buyers.

That kind of reciprocity is justified by almost any cost, and the hit Zappos takes by doing this is paid back multiple times over by the customer loyalty they generate from making people happy.

Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

The bottom line

What’s missing is the concept of service. The desire to help clients achieve their goals rather than to assume you know what their goals should be. Talk about direct response metrics won’t help a client whose brand awareness is trailing by ten points.

Interestingly, top digital players like Yahoo! and Google do understand this. However, many in the industry are still the same arrogant bunch that went down in the first dotcom boom and will surely go down again, screaming “nobody gets it!” along the way.

Like this story? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

More reading on customer experience from our Library:

Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements

10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence

They are the people your customers ask for when they come back. And they’re the employees your customers write letters about, telling you how wonderful they are.

You should include employees and customers in this process. Get their input. Ask them to share their views on what they should expect from your company. They will give you an incredible amount of valuable information.

Step two, watch, listen, and learn. Pay attention to your employees as they take care of your customers. Watch what they do and how they do it.

As you do this, remember the ideal employee profile you created in step one. Make notes of how various employees measure against your standards. Then list these employees and rank them.

If you don’t have any employees who come close to meeting your standards, then you need to think about adding or replacing staff.

Once you have one or more models, you then need to find ways to transfer their Amazing Service behaviors to the rest of your employees. Here are some suggestions.

Publish your service standards.

Print, distribute, and post your service standards. Make sure all your employees know what they are and what they mean. If you want great results, let your customers know what your service standards are too. Use them to make a statement about what they can expect from your company.

Use posters, emails, flyers. Make laminated cards to give to every employee. Put them on customer receipts, signs, menus, brochures, websites – anywhere your customers and employees will see them

Record your models in action.

Use audio or video to record your service models working with customers. Show these in staff meetings on a regular and consistent basis.

Highlight when and how the employee is doing things that meet or exceed your Amazing Service standards. Note: avoid focusing on what they do wrong in these sessions. No one likes to get criticized by a group of their peers. It will make the process less effective.

Have regular coaching sessions

Schedule regular meetings with your staff to coach them to your service standards. Use role-playing as a coaching tool in these sessions. Pick one standard for each meeting.

Prepare several staff before the meeting to play the parts. Let them know you’re serious about using it as a tool for improvement. Make it fun but useful.

Reward employees who deliver the best service

Set up a program to reward and recognize employees who are “caught” delivering the best service. Create ways to acknowledge their efforts publicly. Give prizes, plaques, or other incentives to employees who demonstrate the service standards you are looking for.

Reward employees for noticing when other employees deliver great service.

Plus, it means they’re engaged in the process. To observe a fellow employee delivering the best service, they need to know what it is. They need to understand your standards.

Involve your customers.

Engaging employees to observe and report Amazing Service is good. Getting customers to do it is great. Find ways to get them involved in the process.

Let them know what your standards are and encourage them to nominate employees for recognition and rewards. Make it easy for them to do this. The more engaged your customers are in this, the more loyal they will be.

The bottom line

When we think of improving customer service, we usually think of training. But that will only take us so far. To have a measurable and sustainable improvement, you need to focus on it constantly.

Finding and using role models is an effective way to do this. Try this for 60 days and you’ll see a significant improvement in the quality of your customer service.

Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library: