Good customer service starts with meeting customer needs: a trouble-free shopping experience and a smooth business transaction. Increasingly, it's also about anticipating and meeting their desires
In a marketplace where too many products and services are chasing too little demand, businesses face a daunting challenge: do everything possible to attract and retain customers.
The stakes are high: Reducing customer attrition by 5 to 10 percent can increase annual profits by as much as 75 percent, according to a study by The Wharton School.
"The next economy will be characterized by customer infidelity. Only those companies focusing on the customer experience will command the loyalty necessary to survive and succeed," says Elliott Ettenberg, a former chairman and CEO of Bozell Retail Worldwide and now president of Ettenberg & Company, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in customer service and turnaround marketing.
Customer service starts by offering both a trouble-free shopping experience and a smooth business transaction. But now more than ever it's also about anticipating and meeting a person's or company's wants, not just needs.
Here are eight strategies for creating a relationship with your customers that will keep them coming back:
- Commit to knowing your customer. In today's interconnected and knowledge-based economy, a business's survival depends on how well the business and IT sides of the company join to meet the needs of customers. Until recently, only large enterprises with hefty budgets could afford the tools needed to manage the entire customer experience.
With the advent of new tools and technologies, such as unified communications and affordable customer relationship management software, many of the cost barriers for smaller businesses are disappearing.
"The company of the future will focus on a combination of people, processes, and technology to achieve success and stay competitive in the new interactive economy. And they'll alter their corporate mindset to deliver the rich customer experience, one customer at a time," says Rob Lloyd, Senior Vice President of US and Canada Operations at Cisco. - Create a customer experience roadmap. What is the customer experience you want? What new customer-service capabilities will you need to add? What new resources will allow your workforce to be more effective? Can your existing network support the new technologies your business will need in the future, such as call centers, online services and advanced security? Use these questions to create a customer service roadmap that ensures your IT infrastructure evolves in step with your business vision.
With every business and technology decision ask yourself: "Will this investment help my employees better understand the value and needs of my customers and promote superior customer service?" - Remove barriers to information, connectivity and collaboration. The more you increase your customer knowledge and centralize it into single customer profile, the better positioned you will be to deliver a satisfying customer experience at every customer touch point, be it on the Web, face to face, e-mail, or telephone.
Do your sales, marketing and support people currently manage separate databases? If so, build a strategy to merge all information into a single customer database accessible by as many people in as many places as possible.
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