Communication between a business and its customers is extremely important in today's globalized world. In a small flower shop, a saleswoman always hears compliments if she does her job well, and sees sullen faces of customers if she does her job poorly. But the larger the enterprise becomes, the more difficult it is to trace customer relationships, because there are many more intermediate links in the chain from the consumer to the administrator of at least a regional department.
Why is it so important to know everything about customers
In today's marketplace, the right choice is to make an extra effort to hear your customers, because not knowing what is happening at the most basic levels of your enterprise, you risk losing both money and reputation. And this is true, because history knows many cases when the actions of ordinary workers brought multi-million dollar losses.companies. An example is the case on one of the United Airlines flights, when the company needed to make room on the plane for several of its employees. After the passengers refused to leave the flight, the guards beat several who resisted and took them out by force. This precedent hit the media and the price per share of United Airlines immediately fell by half. If you don't want to lose in business, you just need to know what customer feedback is.
The essence of feedback
Feedback can be called any channel of information transfer, with the help of which the client can influence certain points in the business processes of the company with which he wants to cooperate or is already cooperating. Depending on the form in which your business exists, it is possible to implement feedback in the system in a variety of ways, the main task is to make it convenient for the client and meet the requirements.
What is feedback in physical stores
Real estate business owners or companies engaged in large-scale wholesale trade through specially equipped premises can place feedback telephone numbers in their stores. Calls to the call center will be processed by operators, and information about complaints or customer requests will be transmitted in a structured form to the management department of the organization.
With a large number of the same type of calls, there is also a model in which to adviseclients will have an autoresponder that is scripted for a discrete number of replies. If your feedback, as a structure in the company, is not strong enough to maintain a full-time call center, you can outsource this business process, that is, order this service from another company. Under certain conditions, this type of cooperation is most mutually beneficial.
Internet as a means of interaction
The greatest discovery for mankind at the end of the twentieth century - the Internet - has played a significant role for commerce, which cannot be overestimated. There are a huge number of interactive communication tools on the web for different parts of the business.
E-commerce has now taken a step forward with the help of customer relationship customization tools. There are products for business under the general name Customer relationship management, or in Russian - customer relationship management. A modern CRM system is able to accompany your client at absolutely every stage of the transaction, or, in marketing terms, at every stage of the sales funnel. The sales funnel is not named so by chance, because with each iteration on the way to turning a visitor into a buyer, there are fewer and fewer people in the funnel.
You need to clearly track at what stage of the sales funnel each of your customers is, otherwise the loss of this data threatens you with the loss of a buyer - a customer who is not called back on time will most likely go to another place, because he values his time and convenience of service staff.
What is feedback in the context of CRM? In general, the same thing as without it, just the system allows a business to clearly track all its customers, give each client exactly the information that is of interest to him, and much more. For example, using CRM, you can collect a list of people who have abandoned a product or service due to poor service, call them and offer a special discount coupon in your store. This action will probably not save the situation completely, but it will definitely bring back some of your former clients.
Feedback via email and instant messengers
E-mail appeared at the dawn of the Internet, and since then it has not lost its popularity, because it can be used to conduct both business and personal correspondence, it is convenient to filter and sort it. In addition, it reaches the addressee instantly, so using email for feedback is reasonable and easily managed by the business through CRM. Using email distribution, you can easily collect the necessary data from customers, calculate their statistical preferences, and test the click-through rate of certain ad formats. Gradually, the popularity of e-mails is declining, but, probably, the era of emails will last for some more time, because mail also serves as an identifier on the Internet, that is, it functions as a nickname for authorization in various services.
The maturing competitor of e-mail - messages in instant messengers that are distributed in proportion to the growth in the numbermobile devices on the market. It is quite easy to imagine what feedback through instant messengers is - these are chats in which technical support agents are trying to resolve a client's issue. In addition to live people, bots can also respond to a client in technical support via messenger - special programs scripted for a response that will make you wait a little longer for a message from a support agent.
Chat with technical support on the site and call back
A relatively new trend in audience feedback is in-site chats that update dynamically without reloading the page. This technology allows a person who has landed on a new commercial site for him to get used to and clarify the necessary questions for himself without lengthy searches for a form of communication. The online chat window brings from 10% increase in sales after its installation on the Internet resource.
But many people still prefer voice communication, and this is logical, because we perceive audio speech many times faster and more efficiently. Based on this problem, services have been developed, such as CallBack Killer or CallBack Hunter. Such services allow the client to indicate his number and a convenient time for a conversation on any page of the site, after which technical support agents will call him back at the specified time. All of the above communication methods are also well integrated into CRM and have their own API for software developers.
Cold calls and hot calls
Sometimes a company doesn't have enough information about its customers to improve collaboration and productivity. Suchtelephones are used. Feedback is greatly helped by hot calls - calls by operators to the base of numbers of people who were interested in a product or service. If a company has very little feedback data from potential customers, then large databases of phone numbers are used through which they try to offer their product or service.
Targeting and retargeting
With the help of modern Internet advertising technologies, it is possible to return a potential client to the site without directly knowing his contact details. A technology called "retargeting" allows you to install a special code on the site that tracks the IP address of the visitor and / or writes a cookie on his computer in the browser, reading which the advertising networks on the Internet will show him exactly your advertisements, which you can customize according to the specifics of your project and your tasks.
Back to simple
Small businesses rarely have the budget to hire an entire call center or develop an online resource with many technologically sophisticated features. The simplest solution for a novice entrepreneur is a business card site that would contain information about the company and feedback in html. Hypertext Markup Language is one of the easiest ways to create web pages, so it's great to showcase an example of this html contact form.
Now give the codethis shape.
When specifying the post method in the form attributes, the data will be sent for processing by a file at contactus.php. If your server does not support php, then you can specify the mailto data processing method and your email in the action attribute of the form tag. The latter option is extremely unreliable, as after clicking the "Send" button, Outlook or another email application will open, from which the user will already have to send an email. If you're having trouble with either doing your own web development or hiring a programmer, you can use a Google Form, which can be easily created with an intuitive visual interface.
Dealing with confusion
Sooner or later there will come a time when you can't remember all your customers or just enter them into Excel because another employee won't have access to it. It follows from this that the sooner you implement a CRM system in your business, the easier it will be to manage business processes later. The complexity of managing a business only grows with the growth of the number of clients, so do not hope that the costs of CRM can be avoided.
How to choose a CRM and solve the feedback problem
First, determine what feedback channels you plan to use with users - it can be phone calls, SMS service, online chat on the site, correspondence in instant messengers, e-mail or something else. Then determine which of the available solutions provide such functionality and at what cost. Define,which CRM has the ability to refine functionality, whether it works in the cloud or not. These basic principles will help you communicate with your customers effectively and not lose them in the future.
