8 Steps to Leverage a Customer Relationship Management Database Proactively with Customers

Increase Customer Satisfaction and Retention

One of the most important uses of any customer relationship management database is to proactively interact with customers to increase their satisfaction, retain their loyalty and turn them into the company's best salesmen. A high level of customer satisfaction is the key to customer retention. Most dissatisfied customers will simply leave without ever letting an organization know that their needs were not met or exceeded. If the organization leverages a customer relationship management database correctly then customer expectations can be exceeded on a regular basis. Proactive CRM is an essential method of exceeding customer expectations by reaching out to customers before they contact the company and learning what they think, need and want.

What is Proactive Customer Relationship Management?

Anticipating the concerns of the organizations customers before they become problems can often make the difference between retaining customers and loosing them to competitors. Using the company's customer relationship management database in a proactive manor can mean the difference between customers singing the organizations praises to others or never visiting the website or store again. Taking care of customer or potential customers concerns should be as immediate as possible. The longer a client has to dwell on an issue or concern, the greater the chance that they will stop being a customer.

Proactive Customer Relationship Management Database Techniques

The simplest way to correct customer concerns before they amplify into a major problem is to follow up with the customer by phone or email within 24 hours of receiving the first customer communication. Every organization no mater how small should have a consistent process for dealing with issues. Here is an example of a customer follow up process.

Step one: Assign an employee to be the main employee responsible for follow up calls and emails.

Step two: Use the customer relationship management database to detail all aspects of the situation and the communication from the customer before responding, and assign the issue a ticket number so that the customer will always feel they have been heard.

Step three: Make at least three attempts to contact the customer

Step four: Have a clear process in place to handle customers who can not be contacted

Step five: Document any issues the customer had and the possible resolutions to those issues, even if the customer can not be reached. Make this information part of the information in your customer relationship database so that other customers will benefit from the research done on every call or email.

Step Six: make the information available to the public as part of an FAQ on the organization website.

Step seven: If the employee can not resolve the issue for the customer, than proactively offer to have a manager contact the customer so that they feel connected to the organization and treated with the importance every customer deserves.

Step eight: If the issue is escalated to a manager, make sure that the manager also follows up on the same day.

Taking care of customers concerns quickly and efficiently will increase the likelihood that that customer will return and suggest to others that they try your product or service. Empowering your employees to manage customer issues can make a big difference in the time it takes to resolve a concern. If employees are required to escalate all customer issues to management, the customer is only getting more frustrated and getting the impression that your organization is not prepared to respond and attend to their issues.

Using your customer relationship management database to Get ahead of problems

Using your customer relationship management database is an effective way to stay in constant contact with existing customers and leads via a monthly newsletter delivered in email. It has become very affordable for small businesses to subscribe to cloud based crm systems that provide full email marketing features. These features can deliver personalized email to each customer. Building a newsletter that provides answers to other customers issues and delivering that information to your customers can get you ahead of any situation they may run into with your product and will make them feel that you are in their camp, not resistant to their concerns and issues. Using twitter to address customer issues through social crm features in your database can also publicly direct answers to a individual and increase the companies image as proactive about customer satisfaction.

In this economy an organization can not afford unhappy customers spreading the word on the internet about an unresponsive company. Dissatisfaction can spread fast and cripple a business or product, on the other hand proactive use of a customer relationship management database can resolve issues fast, create happy customers and publicly increase the image of any organization to one of a customer focused service orientated company anyone would want to purchase from.