Coming Up With an Effective Customer Relationship Management Strategy

By: Ailina Calip

Customer relationship management is a very important aspect that all business owners should consider seriously and look for ways to improve in. A good customer relationship management strategy will help to increase your sales while ensuring that your store or business has a repeat clientele.

This can only happen if the employees, who work for you, are well oriented, when it comes to the organization’s customer relationship culture. This can be made possible by:

• Providing training in areas that are important when it comes to delivering an exceptional personal service
• Reinforcing existing skills with ongoing feedback and coaching
• Rewarding their performance through a combination of recognition and monetary awards

Working on Continuous Improvement

When it comes to running a service oriented business, a number of things can go wrong in a single day. Your products and services may be faulty, resulting in customers becoming frustrated and demanding a refund, or some other compensation. In such a scenario, organizations that are efficient at ‘recovery’ will be able to resolve such issues. For this, you will have to:

• Ask for complaints and customer feedback, directly from the source
• Provide effective training to staff when it comes to handling customer complaints
• Actively work on solving the core issue
• Focus on prevention as well as effective problem solving when it comes to complaints

Ensuring Managers are the Key Change-Agents

An effective customer relationship management strategy can only be derived if the middle management i.e. the managers of your store, office, or production area are actively involved in the change process. Your managers have the power to make or break your business; therefore it’s very important to:

• Inform the management team regarding the situation early on
• Give them tools required so that they can articulate customer experience strategies as well
• Provide effective training to managers so that they can be an example to the people under them
• Give reward to managers when it comes to monitoring, establishing and upgrading the service delivery process.