According to a recent report, 79% of consumers prefer personalized services over marketing. Moreover, 84% of the consumers said they could go out of their way if offered a great experience.
Apparently, having a great product can not guarantee the success of your eCommerce business. At least, it cannot promise success in the absence of good customer relationships.
What Does Customer Relationship Mean?
Customer relations are the ways your business engages with consumers to improve their experience. It usually involves identifying the problems, both short-term and long-term. And finding long-lasting solutions to these problems.
The ultimate objective of customer relations is to benefit both – the consumer and the business.
Although customer relationship management (CRM) involves all parts of the business, it is typically associated with customer services.
Nonetheless, here are two critical functions of a good CRM:
- Addressing the pain points, as reported by the customers.
- Establishing brand loyalty to build and nurture longer-lasting customer relations.
It is also noteworthy at this point- customer service and customer relations are not the same. Instead, the former is a part of the latter.
Why Does Your eCommerce Business Need CRM?
As already mentioned, managing customer relations helps with the success of your eCommerce business. But, how exactly?
Keep reading to find out some of the benefits.
- Good customer relations help generate revenue from repeat customers.
- It improves the possibility of additional future purchases.
- Good relations with customers also improve brand loyalty.
- Customer relations also help build your brand image and accentuates word-of-mouth marketing for you.
- It helps identify market problems and remedy them before they can harm your brand’s image.
In short, strong customer relations improve your brand’s recognition and drive more business.
How To Build Good Customer Relations?
Regardless of your customer segment and the goal of your CRM, there are a few key areas that every eCommerce business owner can use. Including you.
Customer First Policy
Developing a customer-centric policy is the first step towards ensuring positive customer relations.
It involves focusing on customers’ experience and successfully implementing long-term solutions to enhance the same.
Here are a few strategies that you can implement to create a customer-centric culture.
- Create a buyer journey to lay out the complete interaction process.
- Anticipate customers’ needs at each step in the process.
- Employ a customer relationship manager to execute initiatives and strategies.
- Create an entry point or an onboarding process for your buyers, such as signing up.
- Ask feedback from your customers.
- Implement proactive responses to your customers.
- Make use of technology and service tools to help you with customer relations.
- Do not ignore the after-sale experience of your customers.
Show Appreciation For Your Customers
You don’t need to make grand gestures for every customer that buys from your online store. But, you can still demonstrate appreciation for your customers.
For example, you can send gift hampers or monthly subscription mails to your customers. For this, you can even partner with product fulfillment services to help collect customer data and stay on top of it.
The idea is to provide your customers with a good experience in little ways. Note that these little gestures can go a long way in building strong relations.
Enable Easily Accessibility For Your Customers
In today’s tech-savvy world, accessibility to customers is not a privilege but a necessity. For instance, having a mobile app for your eCommerce store can quickly help your customers access your products.
In a recent survey, Microsoft reported that one-third of the customers find it annoying when they cannot get the help they need on time.
Try implementing self-help desks for your customers. For instance, you can go for autoresponders and use API tools in your apps to improve accessibility. You can also outsource customer support to help your consumers with the same.
Measure Customer Satisfaction
You don’t only need to satisfy your customers but also keep track of the success rate. In other words, you must implement a strategy to measure how satisfied your customers are.
Of course, as already mentioned, one of the ways is to ask for feedback from your customers. But, it isn’t the only way to measure customer success.
You can also go for fresh market surveys to measure and keep track of your customers’ satisfaction rate.
Improve First Call Resolution Rate
As already mentioned, most consumers are willing to pay more for a better experience. And one of the critical factors that can improve their experience is how fast their queries are resolved.
One of the metrics that can help you measure the quality of experience your company offers to the customers is First Call Resolution (FCR) Rate.
The metric is essentially the percentage of calls that are resolved right after initiation. Perhaps, if your grievance resolution system requires additional follow-ups of touchpoints, it would worsen your FCR rate.
Invest In Employee Training
One of the critical factors that can impact your business’s relations with the customers is how well your employees are trained. Essentially, trained employees tend to create a better customer experience.
Besides, employee training also keeps them self-motivated to improve and enhance their productivity. As a result, they will be able to serve your customers better and faster.
In short, investing in employee training programs is also effective in improving good customer relations.
Reduce TAT With Technology
Most importantly, it would be best if you tried to reduce turnaround time. For instance, if your customer requests an exchange or return, you should try to complete the task as quickly as possible.
However, it can be not easy if you plan to do it manually, particularly when you are scaling your eCommerce business.
It is, indeed, better to invest in technology to help you reduce TAT and improve your customer addressal. Not to mention, it would ultimately improve your customer success rate.
Key Takeaway
The eCommerce space is known for low entry barriers. However, the increasing competition in the market is something that you must not ignore as an entrepreneur.
In the end, the success of your eCommerce venture would depend upon your customers. And you must ensure that their experience does not suffer at all.
