Communication of a business with its customers is extremely important in the modern world where globalization rules. In a small flower shop, the saleswoman always hears compliments if she does her job well and sees the sullen faces of customers if she does the job poorly. But the larger the enterprise becomes, the more difficult it is to trace relationships with customers, because in the chain from the consumer to the administrator of at least the regional department there are still many intermediate links.
Why it is so important to know everything about customers
In today's market, the right choice would be to make additional efforts 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 multimillion-dollar losses to the company. An example is the case on one of the flights of United Airlines, when the company needed to free up space on the plane for several of its employees. After the passengers refused to leave the flight, the guards beat several of those who resisted and withdrew them by force. This precedent hit the media and the price per share of United Airlines immediately halved. If you do not want to lose in business, you just need to know what customer feedback is.
Feedback
Feedback can be called any channel of information transfer through 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
Owners of a real estate business or companies engaged in large-scale wholesale trade through specially equipped premises can post feedback phone numbers in the network of their stores. Calls to the call center will be processed by operators, and information about complaints or customer requests will be transferred in a structured form to the management department of the organization.
With a large number of calls of the same type, there is also a model in which an answering machine will be advised of customers, which is scripted to a discrete number of answers. If your feedback as a structure in the company is not strong enough to contain 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 mutually beneficial.
Internet as a means of interaction
The biggest discovery for humanity at the end of the twentieth century - the Internet - played a significant role for commerce, which cannot be overestimated. The network has a huge mass of interactive interaction tools for different sides of the business.
E-commerce has now gone a long way with personalized customer relationship 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 was not named so by accident, because with each iteration on the way to making the visitor a buyer, there are fewer and fewer people in the funnel.
It is necessary to clearly monitor at what stage of the sales funnel each of your customers is located, otherwise the loss of this data threatens you with the loss of the customer - the customer who has not been called back on time is likely to go to another place, because he appreciates his time and the convenience of the staff.
What is feedback in the context of CRM? In general, the same thing as without it, just a system allows a business to clearly track all its customers, give each client exactly the information that interests him, and much more. For example, using CRM, you can collect a list of people who have refused a product or service due to poor service, call them and offer a special discount coupon in your store. Probably, this action will not save the situation completely, but it will definitely return some of your former customers.
Feedback via email and instant messengers
E-mail appeared at the dawn of the Internet, and since then has not lost its popularity, because with its help you can conduct both business and personal correspondence, it is convenient to filter and sort it. In addition, it reaches the recipient instantly, which is why the use of e-mail for feedback is expedient and easily managed by the business through CRM. Using the e-mail newsletter, you can easily collect the necessary data from customers, calculate their statistical preferences, and test the clickability of various formats of events. The popularity of electronic mailboxes is gradually decreasing, but, probably, the era of emails will last some more time, because mail also serves as an identifier on the Internet, that is, it serves as a nickname for authorization in various services.
A maturing competitor of e-mail is messages in instant messengers that are distributed in proportion to the growing number of mobile devices in the market. What is feedback through messengers is pretty easy to imagine - these are chats in which technical support agents try to solve a client’s question. In addition to living people, bots can also respond to customer support via messenger - special programs that are scripted for an answer that will make you wait a little longer for a message from the support agent.
Technical support chat on the site and call back
A relatively new trend in the area of ​​feedback from the audience is chat within sites that are dynamically updated without reloading the page. This technology allows a person who came to a new commercial site for him to get used to and clarify for himself the necessary issues without lengthy searches for a form of communication. The online chat window brings a 10% increase in sales after it is installed 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 such as CallBack Killer or CallBack Hunter were developed. Such services allow the client to indicate their number and convenient time for a conversation on any page of the site, after which technical support agents will call him back at the indicated 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 does not have enough information about its customers necessary to improve collaboration and productivity. In such cases, use phones. Feedback is very much helped by hot calls - ringing by operators on the basis of numbers of people who were interested in a product or service. If the company has very scarce feedback data from potential customers, then large database of telephone numbers is used, through which they try to offer their goods or services.
Targeting and retargeting
With the help of modern technologies of online advertising, it is possible to return a potential customer to the site without knowing directly his contact information. A technology called "retargeting" allows you to install a special code on the website that monitors the visitor’s IP address and / or records a cookie on his computer in the browser, reading which advertising networks on the Internet will show him exactly your advertising events that you You can customize to the specifics of your project and your tasks.
Back to the simple
Small businesses rarely have budgets for hiring an entire call center or developing an online resource with many technologically sophisticated features. The simplest solution for a novice entrepreneur is a business card website, which would contain information about the company and feedback on html. The hypertext markup language is one of the easiest ways to create web pages, so it’s great to demonstrate an example of this html feedback form.
Now we give the code of this form.
If you specify the post method in the form attributes, the data will be sent for processing by the file to contactus.php. If your server does not support php, then you can specify the mailto data processing method and your email address in the action attribute of the form tag. The latter option is extremely unreliable, because after clicking the "Send" button, Outlook or another email application will open, from which the user will have to send an email. If you are experiencing problems, both with independent web development and hiring a programmer, you can use the Google form, which can be easily created using an intuitive visual interface.
What to do with confusion
Sooner or later, the moment will come when you cannot remember all your clients or simply enter them into Excel, as another employee will not have access to it. It follows that the sooner you implement a CRM system in your business, the easier it will then be to manage business processes. The complexity of managing a business only grows with an increase in the number of customers, so you should not hope that you can avoid the costs of CRM.
How to choose a CRM and solve a feedback problem
First, determine which feedback channels you plan to use with users — these can be phone calls, SMS services, online chat on the site, correspondence in instant messengers, email, or something else. Then determine which of the available solutions provide such functionality and for what money. Determine which CRM has the ability to refine the 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.