Customer Service Mistakes Your Business Might Be Making

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service|Customer Service Mistakes Your Business Might Be MakingCustomer service is the backbone of any successful business. No matter how great your product may be, it will struggle to sell if your customer service skills are lacking. Treating customers the right way is often the difference between getting good reviews and earning brand loyalty, and consumers avoiding your company altogether. The trouble is, no business is perfect, and mistakes are often made. With that in mind, here are six customer service errors to avoid.

Skimping On Staff Training

You can’t expect your customer service staff to deliver quality service if they have no training. It doesn’t matter whether you have three or three hundred staff members, you must train all of them to do their jobs. This training should be an ongoing and dynamic process to allow your staff to work their very best. If you can’t train your employees yourself, then bring in an expert to do so.

Failing To Keep Promises

When you make a promise to a customer, you must make sure that you deliver on it. For those offering a service, you should check that you have what you need to carry it out, whether that be cleaning products or commercial machine tools. Anyone with a retail business must have plenty of stock. If you break a promise you’ve made, it will damage any relationship that you have built.

Hiding Your Contact Information

Live chat, text messages, and social media have completely transformed the relationship between businesses and consumers. With these tools, you can offer customers a much greater convenience than ever before. The trouble is, many companies forget to display their contact details or purposefully hide them. Doing this will frustrate customers and cause suspicion.

Forgetting Self-Service Options

While it’s essential to be available to customers, you must understand that not all of them will want to contact your business. After all, customer service lines are infamous for their high charges and long wait times. Thankfully, you can help customers help themselves. A FAQ page is a common feature on company websites, as are user manuals, buying guides, and videos.

Ignoring All Customer Feedback

When a customer takes the time to leave you feedback, you must make sure that you read and respond to it. Although no entrepreneur likes to read a negative review, this sort of feedback is beneficial. You wouldn’t know where you needed to improve without it. Listen to all you are told and assure customers that you’ll get back to them if you don’t have a solution right away.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service|Customer Service Mistakes Your Business Might Be MakingRude Behavior Of Employees

There is no excuse for rude behavior. As frustrating as it can be dealing with a problematic customer, arguing back will only make the situation worse. This is something that all well-trained customer service employees should already know. Customers won’t tolerate rudeness from your staff, so you shouldn’t either. If you believe an employee made a mistake, then tell them that they did.

Without customers, your business has nothing. To treat yours right, make sure that you avoid the mistakes listed above.

4 Ways to Improve Customer Care in Your Call Center

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Care|4 Ways to Improve Customer Care in Your Call Center If you’re managing a call center, customer care is the name of the game. You’ll undoubtedly have all kinds of targets to meet, and it’s in your interests to make every call a customer care success. How can you make this a reality? Sometimes, customer care is less about focusing on the caller, and more about investing energy in your staff. Here are four ideas on how to improve customer care in your call center.

Service with a smile

Did you know that a smile can be heard on the phone? Picking up the phone with a smile on your face can make your voice sound warmer and friendlier, and encourage the caller to trust you. This all happens subconsciously, without the customer really being aware! It’s a free, easy way to build a connection instantly. With a smile, you can set up in the right way even the most challenging of calls. Train your staff on this simple trick, and you could see customer satisfaction shoot up!

Celebrate your staff

If you want your staff to smile on the phone, you’ve got to give them plenty of reasons to beam off the phone, too. Working in a call center can be energetic, fast-paced, and fun. But it can also be draining and repetitive. Not to mention the exhaustion of dealing with angry customers. Keep spirits high by celebrating your staff regularly. This is how BPOs in the Philippines motivate their employees. They recognize employees achievements monthly, quarterly, and annually, and provide perks that they can enjoy. Your celebration could be as simple as some targeted praise after a perfect call that you overhear. Or you could create a reward system, perhaps where coworkers nominate each other, or based off a leaderboard related to departmental targets.

Create a positive environment

So much of excellent customer service comes down to brilliant representatives. But even if you hire the very best representatives available, if the environment is poor, they will either leave or become disengaged. The culture of the call center should be all about support and positivity. Then these elements will feed into the service provided. Remember, the culture is often dictated by what happens at the top. Think about how senior staff communicate and how they handle challenges. The team will look to them to set the tone for the entire department, so it’s vital they set a shining example. Positivity is everything.

Get the right tools

Making use of the latest tools like Knowledge base software could really boost your call center and make customer service a breeze. Artificial intelligence applications can make life easier for representatives as well as customers. You should also invest in analytics tools which will enable you to track and record statistics relating to calls and customer experience. This can be useful for training, appraisals, and rewards.

It might be possible for some of the processes within the department to be automated completely. For example, you can use RPA tools for real-time automation. This can improve productivity and allow for proactive staff training. Saving time and boosting productivity means benefits for you and your customers. You could even take the bold move of asking your staff what tools might help them better do their job.

Conclusion

Getting call center operations right can be extremely challenging. If you wish to outsource call center services as a business, read this comparison guide first.

Benefits of Private Yacht Charter – Exclusive for On-The-Water Cruising Experience

/in , /by

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Benefits of Private Yacht Charter - Exclusive for On-The-Water Cruising ExperienceYou desire an undocked, strategic customer social engagement or executive team building event on a yacht charter with private crew and explore the South of France. Antibes is popular for yachting. As it is near Nice airport, embarking and disembarking charter yacht is easy for tourists cruising towards the South. Therefore, to book a private yacht charter Antibes look for a reliable charter broker. They will even offer expert advice about the key attractions you must see, while cruising.

A private yacht charter Antibes with a whole crew offers a lot of benefits, which you will not enjoy on commercial cruise line. It will offer an exclusive and memorable relationship building meetings on-the-water.

Leave concerns on the land

Before departure, you will need to discuss meal and activities with the crew. Everything from fully stocked bad, food and beverage selection and onboard water equipment [snorkeling gear, kayaks, paddleboards, fishing tolls, etc. will be taken care of prior you arrive.

Flexibility

There will be no itinerary dates or durations pre-planned. The time you go island hopping and come back will depend on you. It does not matter where you desire to undock, take the pleasure in cruising personalized itinerary according to your comfort and convenience. With every sunrise new story needs to be revealed and with every sunset extraordinary memory to be created.

All access passes

With a private yacht, you can easily gain access to pristine beaches and intimate coves, which commercial cruise ships cannot. Moreover, crewed charters can access secluded anchorages and hidden harbors, which self-skippered yachts cannot. It is an all access pass enabling you to enjoy unfiltered views, fresh air and minimal distractions. You can get closer to nature in a very personal way.

No stress of packing

You are accompanied with near and dear people, so there is no concern about dressing, so all-inclusive private charter meeting becomes less stressful in terms of packing. Moreover, you will dine most of the time onboard, so you get a chance to determine the dress code.

Customized menu

With personal gourmet chef to prepare meals onboard as per your preselected menu offers the freedom to dine without any concern about picky eaters, allergies, and dietary restrictions accompanying your meeting cruise. Moreover, all the spirits and meals are selected by you in advance, so you don’t need to struggle with choosing a menu. Just relax as reservation is also not needed.

No boating experience is needed

Fortunately, with private yacht charter you get a trained crew. You don’t need any boating experience because the crew does all the tasks onboard. You enjoy the cruise and VIP services offered.

Unlimited activities

While it is warm, you can go snorkeling and explore the underwater. Take spouses and significant others kayaking or you can even enjoy a cooking class from onboard gourmet chef. The yacht will also be equipped with latest technology for entertainment. You can even plan a wild night on the shore in some foreign city and return back but let the captain and crew know about your whim. They will cooperate happily!

With private yacht charter, indulge and relish a dream meeting!

5 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM Solution

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | CRM Software| 5 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM SolutionBuying software and changing your business processes is a major decision. The same is true if you are considering changing software tools such as adopting CRM software. After all, it affects your sales, your marketing and your service workflows. It probably costs money to implement as well. However, you may be losing money if you don’t change when your business is in dire need of Customer Relationship Management software. Here are five signs your business needs a CRM solution.

The Productivity of Your Staff is Falling

Manual processes like filling out forms and filing them or maintaining spreadsheets take a lot of time. What worked when you had a few dozen clients becomes unworkable when you have hundreds or thousands of people, and the productivity of your staff falls as they struggle to scale up inefficient systems. CRM systems replace these manual processes, automating a lot of data entry and repetitive work. The faster access to accurate data increases revenue per salesperson by forty percent. This allows the organization to grow, and CRM systems will scale much better than your paper filing system.

It can improve the productivity of the rest of the team by giving everyone a single, shared interface containing all of the relevant data. One study found that three fifths of employees say they have to search through four or more systems to find information. That’s wasted time in every case, and it can lead to mistakes. Whether your customer is placing an order, calling customer service or talking to the warranty department, all notes about the customer interactions and all of their history is available to whomever is working with them at that moment. Anyone in the organization can see where clients are in the lifecycle and know exactly what they need.

Sometimes the issue is the basic CRM system you have. Hubspot is one of the most widely used CRM tools, but it is easy to end up with it being just another database to maintain. You may need help integrating it with your website or existing databases. This is where consultants like Chief Martech Officer come in. These HubSpot experts can optimize HubSpot, making it easier to administer or create the custom reports you need. Or you may need help training staff in the proper use of Hubspot’s features, so that their productivity will hit the levels you hoped for.

You Don’t Know What Your Sales Team is Doing

If you don’t know what your sales team is doing, you probably need a CRM system. CRM systems give you visibility into the sales process. They create a centralized place where all information about their schedules and clients are, typically in easy to read dashboards. You can see how many appointments each person has and the number of prospects they’re working with. This allows you to ensure that sales leads don’t fall through the cracks, and you can hold salespeople accountable when they didn’t follow up. You’ll reduce the number of missed sales, and that will improve the bottom line.

You Don’t Know How Your Sales Team Is Performing

CRM systems eliminate tedious, manual reporting. The Customer Relationship management system will generate the reports with a few clicks, freeing up your time for the more important task of analyzing it.

CRM systems allow you to compare the performance of sales people relative to their targets. It allows you to see how your team is doing relative to department goals, and you can pull up this information at any time. It gives you the up-to-date information you need to take corrective action instead of being surprised you fell short of your goals this month.

You won’t have to worry about creating reports and trying to figure out what they mean, either. CRM systems have built-in reporting and data analysis to give you an insight into customer demographics, seasonal trends, and preferences for individual customers or entire groups. You can study the buying habits of existing customers and start to work on nurturing existing business relationships.

Customer Service is Inconsistent or Constantly Bad

If customer service is inconsistent, your organization doesn’t have a shared set of information and business processes. This means that one department may have great service but another doesn’t. And a third department may fall short of good customer service because they simply don’t have the information that they need to do the right thing. All of this contributes to low customer satisfaction. A customer relationship management system allows you to give all customer-facing employees access to all prospect and customer information, and it can be used to standardized business processes.

A side benefit of adopting a CRM system is that it ensures accountability. Customers don’t fall through the cracks because no one took responsibility for a prospect or didn’t follow up on a customer’s problems. You must implement a good CRM system to be able to work on customer experience management.

You Don’t Know What You Do and Don’t Know

How many clients do you have? Who are your clients? If you don’t know this, you may let a lead walk out the door because you didn’t take a hot lead seriously. If you are relying on a key person to know everything, you run the risk of losing information because their laptop was infected with a virus or they left the company. With a CRM system, all of the information is stored in a centralized location.

Furthermore, that data can be backed up to a safe, alternate location. You can pull reports to find out anything you need to know, and you don’t have to worry about mistakes made because people lacked the information they needed to make the right decision. You’ll also know that your departing sales team won’t leave with a list of all their customers.

CRM tools allow you to improve the customer experience and improve the bottom line. Once your business reaches a certain point, you can’t afford not to have a CRM system.

Are You Connecting With Your Customers?

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service|Are You Connecting With Your Customers?There are so many things that go into making any kind of business truly successful in the modern age. The truth is that trying to keep up with all of the things that you have to deal with as a business owner can actually be somewhat overwhelming. The main issue is trying to figure out what needs to be at the top of the list of your priorities. A lot of different people will give you different answers to this question. They will say that you need to focus on marketing your business. Others will insist that you need to pay attention to your bottom line above all things. Others will say that keeping up with the times should be your number one priority. However, the truth is that the thing that you should really be paying the most attention to combines all of these things together. The truth is that the one thing that you need to be focusing on more than anything else is your customer base. Your customers are the only reason that your business is something real and not just another pipe dream and you need to make sure that you’re connecting with them properly. However, that can often be something of a challenge. With that in mind, here are some things that you can do to connect more effectively with your customers.

Understanding them

The first thing that you have to understand when it comes to making sure that you’re connecting with your customers is that you have to understand who your customers actually are. There are plenty of great businesses that come up with incredibly effective marketing techniques that still end up failing because they haven’t actually figured out their demographic. This isn’t just a matter of knowing the vague age groups or gender of your target audience. You need to be able to understand your target customers well enough that you can create a clear and detailed profile of them. That way you can not only tailor your marketing to them but you can tailor all aspects of your business in such a way that it is going to be as appealing to them as possible.

Understanding the modern landscape

Of course, it’s not just your customers you need to understand, you also need to understand the context that both you and they are in. The most important change that has come about in terms of how businesses and customers relate to one another is that people generally aren’t as receptive to traditional advertising as they might once have been. Not only that but they often actually find more overt and traditional forms of advertising frustrating and distasteful. Ads are skipped at the start of Youtube videos and pop-ups are closed almost instantly. Customers are interested in content in the modern era and you need to be sure that you’re providing them with just that. Just look at the way that a lot of brands are using social media these days. They’re not just advertising their products. They’re talking to people, making jokes, creating an emotional connection that is essential to building a relationship with customers in the modern era.

Embracing new technology

Technology has also played a major part in the way that businesses connect with their customers. The internet and social media are obvious examples of this but there are ways to go beyond that in how you embrace modern technology. Something that allows you to queue up social media posts on sites like Twitter or your business’s blog means that you’re able to keep up with a clear upload schedule while still focusing on other elements of your business. A few weeks is a lifetime online so a service like that is incredibly valuable. A chatbot on your website is also incredibly useful since it lets you automate a degree of your customer service and remove any barrier between your customers and the information and support they need. Check out this bot building resource page for information how to really get the most out of your website. These might not be the biggest changes in the world, but they’re the kinds of things that can make a huge difference.

Going beyond marketing

The idea of the chatbot raises an interesting point in terms of how you might need to change the way that you’re thinking about connecting with your customers. Most of the time this idea is focussed around marketing, which is certainly important. However, it’s also important to understand that your relationship with your customers goes way beyond marketing. You also need to think about the support and customer service that you’re offering at every stage of your customer’s interaction with your business. Otherwise, you’re going to be putting in plenty of effort into bringing in customers, but no effort into keeping them.

Putting in the effort

Speaking of effort. It’s essential to understand that if you want to connect with your customers in a meaningful way, you have to be willing to put the work in. This is not a part of your business that you can set aside until it’s convenient. It’s an integral part of your business from the very start and if you’re not paying it enough attention, you’re going to end up in trouble.

Of course, it’s essential to understand that this is far from the only thing that you have to worry about when it comes to trying to really make your business the best it can possibly be. The reality is that you need to give the same level of care and attention to every single part of your business because if you don’t then you’re going to end up dropping the ball. It can often feel like you’re spinning plates and keeping them all level can be an exhausting challenge. But that’s just the nature of the beast when it comes to running your own business. It’s the choice that you need to be sure of before you dive in for good. You need to be sure that you’re the kind of person who can handle the pressure and challenge that comes with running any kind of business at all.