In today’s competitive world of product development it is more important than ever for companies to keep customers satisfied. After all, they are the reason the business is still standing. However, in a busy corporate environment, it’s easy to fall behind on projects and deliver problematic products or services, which results in a tense relationship between the company and the customer.
What is customer relation management?
Customer relation management is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. To organize and better coordinate projects, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is used.
The goal of customer relation management is to find new customers, retain existing ones while trying to win old customers back and reduce costs. This is a business-wide strategy, within which the whole company – management, marketing, sales and services departments must collaborate.
Choosing the right customer relation management software
There are many CRM software to choose from – but how do you choose the right one? Jacob Morgan, principal of Chess Media Group, addresses this issue in a blog post : “Of course, it’s never quite that simple and tools are simply enablers. Gil Yehuda used a great example in a different context but he said that essentially tools are like owning the ‘Taebo’or ‘6 minute abs’ DVD series. Just because you own those DVDs doesn’t mean you’re going to get in shape. The same is true for CRM tools, they need to be backed up by something more, a strategy and a process.” (www.jmorganmarketing.com).
Traditional vs. social customer relation management
Traditional customer relation management revolves around the notion a company can keep its customers satisfied by employing the right marketing, sales, and services techniques.
Social customer relation management takes this a step further. Instead of the company trying to maintain a relationship with the customer, it is the customer who owns the relationship. That being said, an SCRM tool does more than sales and marketing. Within an SCRM tool, company members can listen to and interact with customers to find out what they really want.
OneDesk facilitates customer relation management
With OneDesk, customers can submit feedback through a customer community portal, which allows companies to engage their customers into the development process by collaborating with them, and keeping them updated on their feedback’s status. Social tools such as chat, discussion forums and blogs allow for a customer-driven relationship with the company. Information about OneDesk’s social tools can be found here.