Sales Force Marketing - Salesforce.com CRM:

Use CRM to Foster Customer Loyalty

In order for any business to grow and succeed in the market, it is imperative that they know their customers. It is one of the single most important things to do in order to stand out amongst competitors. Your business' ability to retain customers and build loyalty is not just based on their confidence in your products and services, but also on their confidence in your company and employees.

Your business can build these confidences by improving the customer's perception of your company. One way to achieve this is by constructing a comprehensive, relevant and accurate profile of each customer using CRM:

When gathering information to create each profile, you should include:
- their purchase history with your business 
- their concerns and inquiries 
- customised and/or unique product requirements 
- relevant history of their business as well as sales/revenues 
- their corporate and management structure 
- their contact details (company website, email address, landline and fax telephone numbers, etc) 
- past contract and pricing agreements 
- their credit terms and applications

Knowing your customer well is a critical step towards creating a lasting positive impression on your customers as well as long-term beneficial relationships with them.

Eventually, when a customer calls - whether to inquire about your business or to voice a complaint - you will already have this information in hand together with the necessary systems and procedures in place to recall it quickly so that you can deal with the customer's concerns promptly. Customers don't care how you solve their problems, as long as you do it quickly and do it well.

A comprehensive customer profile can be a powerful tool to build and maintain strong customer relations. Not every customer has a record system which is complete and their representative communicating with your business may not be one who initiated the account, or even have access to their data. If your company and people are able to display efficiency and competency of knowing the necessary and relevant details of the customer's business and needs, it tends to inspire confidence in your company and moves the relationship closer to that of a partner than just merely a supplier. Easy communications, speedy troubleshooting, and strong familiarity between parties are the hallmarks of superior customer service and ultimately the catalyst for customer satisfaction. This is where a user-friendly and efficient CRM software application can really demonstrate its worth in helping your business to know your customer.

A point which is often overlooked when it comes to CRM systems is that it does not only serve to inform management about the customer, but it should be finely tuned towards helping the day-to-day users (your frontline staff who deal with customers). Yes, CRM is a great way to generate timely reports and keep track of indicators such as complaints, revenues, sales trends, etc. and also to keep track of your business' own sales and marketing activities.
However, businesses should not lose sight of what it is ultimately there for, which is to improve customer relationships and increase customer satisfaction and goodwill.

Source: Hasan Reynore link

Contact us for a free sales and marketing consultation on the effectiveness of your current go-to-market strategies and to discuss how our RevGen Sales Systems can improve your bottom line.