Improving customer communication through technology
Communication is everything today.
It's the little interactions with your customers in every moment, whether directly with your sales people or via social media, that establish trust and meaningful relationships. In turn, these drive revenue and invaluable word-of-mouth marketing. If your organisation can master communications, growing your business will be that much easier.
Fortunately, improving customer communication is simple with the right technology on your side. A powerful customer relationship management (CRM) system should underpin your communication strategy to enable better results from your sales team. Let's take a look at how that works.
Upgrading your meeting scheduling
A great CRM system helps your sales people plan their calls efficiently.
Maintaining consistent, positive communications with your customers is vital. Keeping your existing relationships healthy is all about being available when your customers need you. It's for this reason that sales people strive to keep up a regular call cycle with their customers. They want to ensure that they're not far away when a customer is in need.
A key factor in making this happen is effective call planning and time management. For your sales people, this means organising a call cycle that has them moving about their territory intelligently. An effective call cycle will never place your sales people too far from a given customer's area. A great CRM system helps your sales people plan their visits according to location so that they can spend as much time in front of customers as possible.
Gaining insight to communication gaps
Even with a call cycle in place, gaps can form in your communications when customers are unavailable or postponing calls. When these gaps grow, customers can become distant and it can be difficult to know if they're facing any issues. To stay on top of communications, you need oversight across every account's health and sales activity.
A CRM system like Rhino by Forte IS includes a number of valuable sales reporting features which provide valuable insight into your customer relationships. A Gap Analysis report highlights opportunities for a greater level of contact with your customers as well as detailing reasons communications may have been lacking – such as unresponsive contacts, competitors gaining ground, or rocky relationships.
Armed with intelligent reporting, you can improve communication strategies, turn customer relationships around and identify underperformance as necessary.
Keeping your sales people informed
As your business ramps up, your sales team will take on more and more customers. Sometimes it's simply not practical to expect a single sales person to remember every detail about each customer – particularly those who require minimal contact. As such, a record of every customer interaction is vital so your staff can refresh themselves ahead of every call, or even make quick references during the call.
This is where the customer data repository of a CRM system becomes priceless. Your sales team may currently store client information across disparate spreadsheets, making it difficult and time-consuming to catch-up on call history or transactions. With all of this data in a single, central location, reviewing recent activity is quick and easy.
As a result, your sales people can enter calls with complete confidence they have the most up-to-date information possible about your customers and can thereby answer any question or problems they might face.
Handing over customer accounts
For whatever reason, there will come a time you need to induct new sales people to your organisation. Whether you're expanding the team to handle more customers or one of your sales people is moving on from the company, accounts will need to be handed over to new staff.
This can be a tricky process. Even when your organisation stays otherwise unchanged, a new sales person can make a customer feel as though the relationship has to be started completely anew. Naturally, this is a trying time for your customer relationship that must be navigated with sensitivity and care to keep everything running smoothly.
Your CRM's customer information repository equips your new team with a thorough history of sales activity, account contacts and call history, helping them rekindle and foster highly valuable relationships.
Empower your customer relationships with Rhino
CRM has always been clouded with complications and technical nonsense. Consequently, many sales people have struggled to tap into the great communication benefits of their CRM systems. Finally, a solution that places simplicity and power at the top of the list is here.
Rhino by Forte IS is an Australian-owned CRM system that emphasises user-friendliness and results, made by sales people, for sales people. To find out more about what Rhino can bring to your business, request a free demo today.
