This can only happen if the employees, who work for you, are well-trained and follow your customer retention program when it comes to the organization’s customer relationship culture. You can achieve this by:

  • Develop your customer relationship/ retention program (you have one right?)
  • Allocate part of your marketing budget to CRM/retention
  • Develop a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to provide benchmarks for your team to meet on customer satisfaction and measure it frequently.
  • Develop a training program and provide ongoing training in areas that are important when it comes to delivering an exceptional personal service –
  • Reinforcing existing skills with systematic, 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 were 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 and often
  • Take ownership when something goes wrong, acknowledge the customer’s feelings of frustration
  • Provide effective training to staff when it comes to handling customer complaints
  • Train your staff on DISC and how to communicate with frustrated customers
  • Actively work on solving the core issue to eliminate reoccurring issues
  • Focus on prevention as well as effective problem solving when it comes to issues

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 immediately
  • Give them tools required so that they can articulate customer experience strategies as well
  • Provide effective training to managers so that they are an example to the people under them
  • Give reward to managers when it comes to monitoring, establishing and upgrading the service delivery process.

For more on developing an effective CRM and improving customer retention, feel free to get in touch.