Competition is fierce nowadays. Since the rise of e-commerce businesses, the supply of products is tremendous and it has become more difficult to obtain loyal customers. However, there is still a way to get customers to come back to you. This way is called customer management. If a company is able to satisfy their customers again and again, they will have no reason to switch to your competitors. However, customer management can be complex, especially for large businesses with an extensive customer base. Therefore, a company should implement tools to ease their customer management.
Digitizing customer interactions
Customer interactions should be digitized as much as possible. To be able to do that, a customer portal is needed in which all customer contracts, order management and order track and trace can take place. Digitizing customer interactions prevents mistakes and smoothens the process of the interactions. An example of a successful customer portal can be found at the chemical production plant that implemented a customer portal using https://triggre.com/. Before this production plant implemented the customer portal, customers lacked self-service capabilities which complicated the customer interactions. It is no surprise that customer satisfaction dropped because of this. Also, high order handling efforts were needed to be able to provide a sufficient order process. However, after this company started using the customer portal of Triggre, their customer satisfaction increased significantly. This is because the portal enables the business to have a 24/7 insight into contracts, orders and deliveries. Also, the actual stock balance is available due to a real-time connection with their ERP system. If you want to know more about this customer portal application, take a look!
Build a relationship
Although a digital customer platform is a great tool for optimizing customer management, efforts into the real-life relationship with customers is still needed and essential to be a winner to your customers. Customers need to feel heard, and not get the impression that they are just a number. Therefore, investment into the relationship with them is necessary. Companies should build trust with customers by being open for conversation at all times. Honesty and transparency about expectations from both sides is needed. Also, sharing success stories and confidence will convince customers to stay with the company. A business should be organized to be able to deliver to customers what they request at all times. Concluding, an effort should be taken into satisfying customers outside the digital and automated world.
Keep surprising
As they say, standing still is going back. It is important for businesses to always be innovative and surprise their customers with new stuff. Although a company may have the feeling they are doing great, improvement is needed to still be great in the future. This prevents customers from switching to competitors in the long term. Therefore, investments should be made into continuous improvement and invention of new products, processes and customer management tools. Surprising customers keeps them loyal, makes them spend more and encourages positive word-of-mouth.