Effective Customer Relationship Management Tips For Startups

From customer service horror stories associated with changing the terms of service at Instagram to airline lost luggage tweet disasters, too many startups aren't approaching customer relationships well. Satisfied customers, loyalty programs, and referrals keep your company thriving while lowering the costs associated with marketing and acquiring new customers. But a customer relationship and referral management system must be well designed and skillfully implemented to yield strong results. There are some essential tips for startups.

1. Customer-oriented Culture:

To differentiate yourself from others, you need to create a customer oriented organization. This kind of culture is cumbersome to achieve without a proper and comprehensive CRM, One which would cover the important aspects of management like marketing, sales and service. If entire team uses one platform which provides complete insight to customer engagement, they are in better position to take care of customers.

2. Tell the software what to streamline:

Manual processes are not only time-consuming, but they're also prone to human error. CRM Solutions for small business can remove this barrier by importing information, making smarter schedules and compiling related data.

According to a report covered on IBM developer Works, “ease of use” is the most wanted feature in a CRM. One way to make a CRM easy to use is by telling the system to group information together by prospect rather than by activity. This will help increase sales.

3. Start with your Sales Team:

If you want to provide excellent social CRM services, you need to have the best sales team out there. That is why you need to invest time and resources into recruiting the greatest people for the job. Your ideal candidates need to show empathy, be patient, positive, have clear communication skills, acting skills, the ability to really listen coupled with many other customer service skills. Finding them won’t be easy.

Given that satisfied employees will produce even more satisfied customers, it wouldn’t hurt considering an anonymous suggestion box or an employee engagement survey to see what matters for your employees and what would make them happy to be working for you.

4. Be smart with communications and timing:

Given all the varied forms of social media—texting, FaceTime or Skype, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, email—not only do we have more ways than ever to connect, we have more opportunity to be communicating with customers in a manner they do not desire.

If you are looking to be regarded as a distinctive company, you will want to ask your customers how they wish to be contacted. If they want a text, that’s what they’ll get. In other words, working to be a distinctive company means you aren’t focused on a set policy or what’s more convenient for you or the way you’ve always done it. You deliver customer messages in the format the customer has chosen. The same with timing: you should encourage your customers to tell you the best time to contact them, though there is a certain caveat to this: you should also not wait too long before contacting your customers, especially your new ones if you didn’t get any word from them about when to contact them.