Getting to know your customers is harder than ever before. As a service sales professional, you’re overloaded with customer information from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and you have hundreds of business relationships to manage through your own internal systems. Add to this, today’s customers expect you to know who they are. Not just their buying behaviors and channel preferences, but they expect you to know who they are on a human level. During the course of conversations with your customers, you’re discovering what they did over the weekend, their interests, their passions, their families, their likes, and dislikes. It’s extremely hard to earn their trust and goodwill unless you engage with them in meaningful ways consistently to create memorable experiences around things that matter to them.
In order to create customer loyalty through trust and goodwill, you need to retain what you learn about your customers and have a meaningful, consistent, personalized engagements with them. But where are you supposed to keep this information?
Today’s Challenge: No Tool to Surprise and Delight
The challenge comes when you try to use the rich information you’ve collected to surprise and delight your customers and improve their overall experience. Chances are you capture great pieces of information in your memory, on paper, or even in the notes section of your CRM. But what happens to it after that?
I don’t know about you, but as I get older my memory isn’t what it used to be. I also find myself writing more notes and then never looking at them again.
CRM systems are great at capturing transactions and interactions customers have with a company. But they fall short when it comes to really knowing the customer on the human level. In a conversation with a financial advisor recently, he described his CRM as a place “where data goes to die.” I’m not saying CRM systems are bad. I’m suggesting that they’re lacking in the relationship category because there’s nowhere in the CRM system to store detailed “relationship” information. After all, relationships aren’t based solely on data points, transactions, and business deals, they’re about connecting with people on the emotional level and building trust.
You may also be using social media to connect with your customers. But social media is self-serving. These platforms aren’t meant to serve customers in a meaningful way or create that emotional connection. They’re crafted to “self-promote and sell.” How many times have you received the default LinkedIn message congratulating you on a work anniversary or birthday? Social platforms don’t provide the flexibility to store information and suggest meaningful actions to engage your business relationships.
No matter where you capture these nuggets of information, you may only reference them from time to time, and that’s if you remember where they are. We all have the best of intentions when we learn something new about a customer; but there are only so many hours in the day to do something with that information.
Tomorrow’s Solution: A Tool to Build Meaningful Relationships
Though the traditional approaches outlined above can work on a small scale, there are other ways to build relationships that are much more effective. The ideal tool for building deep and meaningful relationships with your customers would save you time, be easy to use, be proactive, and actionable. Let me explain.
1.Saves You Time. The right tool should do the work for you. No more exhaustive searches looking for the perfect gift or personalized content for your customers. You shouldn’t be spending your time doing research on a prospects or customers, you should be engaging with that person. For instance, you know that one of your clients is going to New York City in a few weeks. The right tool will provide you automatic contextual content and appropriate gesture with which you can engage your client about activities going on, what restaurants to go to, and the local weather forecast along with links for more contextual information.
2.Easy to Use. All the information about your prospects or customers should be on one screen, no toggling between systems or looking at spreadsheets anymore.
3.Proactive. The right tool will help you learn more about person’s interest, family and life moments and suggest meaningful actions to delight them consistently.
4.Actionable. There should be a sophisticated analytics engine working behind the scenes providing you with contextual, personalized recommendations that can be immediately acted upon. You’ve put in a lot of effort to learn about your customers, you should be able to do something with that information. If you don’t, your competition will.
Research shows that service professionals who cultivate deep, personal, meaningful relationships get 3x more referrals and have more profitable accounts. What’s it worth to you to build more meaningful relationships with your customers? One referral? 10 referrals? Five new sales? For a wealth management firm, a referral can be worth upwards of $500K. For a staffing firm, a referral can be worth more than $10K. Those numbers can add up quickly.
How do you manage your customer information beyond the transactional data so you can use it to build more meaningful relationships?
Coming up next…
Now that you’ve captured all this rich data about your customers, how do you drive meaningful engagement with them and your entire customer base consistently (and quickly)?
