According to the 2012 Forrester report, organizations have spent $11 billion on Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Every organization wants to positively interact with its customers, for without them there is no business. With enhanced CRM, organizers tend to have better customer retention and develop long term relationships. A number of CRM strategies have evolved over time.
Customer life cycle is what every organization tries to figure out. It means drawing a potential customer’s attention, educating them on what you have on offer, converting them into purchasers, and then finally keeping them as your brand loyalist who will have considerable influence over potential clients in order to transform them into full-fledged and devoted consumers.
Connect with Your Customers
Build up a comfort level with your customers. Ask for their feedback and suggestions on aspects that most affect their interactions with you. Listen to the demands of an angry customer and resolve the matter as soon as you can. Target each customer with offers that match their purchasing power and mentality.
Constant Training
Sales and marketing teams work on a 24/7 schedule to provide instant services to their customers. To provide excellent customer services, the teams need extensive training besides ensuring your organization has a buyer-friendly corporate culture. These instruction sessions need to be organized at different points of time to analyze various components of the CRM plan.
Make sure that the attendees develop a checklist to measure success in handling a variety of customers. Also, try to identify how CRM creates value for your organization and clients. It is important to manage training registration carefully; not to leave any associate out. The training sessions should be well structured enabling a rotation mode of learning from each other.
Social Media
The way we connect and interact with people is changing. Companies, both small and large, have started exploring the potentiality of social media to better engage with their customers, sponsors, and employees. You can create profile pages on various social networking sites such as: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. to post and share content, images, videos with fellow online users. With time, you can develop strong connections with like-minded users and eventually draw them towards your organization, products and services.
You already have your customer’s personal contact details (in your company database); your job will be to find them on Facebook or Twitter. Become their friend and get to know them by visiting their personal pages. These websites are great for resolving critical issues with your patrons and realize their expectations from your company. Use these web platforms to smoothen things over so that you can leave them with a feeling of satisfaction and end up having a better relationship than what you had before.
Loyalty Programs
CRM can help create loyalty amongst your customers. Jupiter Research has found that approximately 75 percent of the U.S. consumers now have at least one loyalty card. Further research has found businesses spending billions of dollars every year on loyalty programs to attract more consumers into their stores. Through such loyalty programs – gift coupons, cash-backs, etc. companies create a shopping spur amongst their clientele to come and use their solutions, attend events, and so on.
Online CRM Solutions
Salesforce, a leading US-based software company has introduced Cloud-based CRM solutions to improve business to business (B2B) and business to customer (B2C) engagements. The Cloud-based CRM solutions are used by millions of enterprises to effectively manage leads, contacts, and events. For example, you can use the Salesforce’s CRM service to automate your day-to-day business activities. Therefore it leaves you with more time to focus upon sales and marketing strategies to increase event attendance.
Acteva allows Salesforce users to add the power of online registration and payment management to their range of business meetings, conferences, seminars, fundraisers, and so on. Companies can use Acteva’s powerful Salesforce Connector to easily invite and manage their leads and contacts from Salesforce. The Connector will also help in automatically updating your Salesforce CRM database with all registrants and payments data covering individual events and activities.
