Customer loyalty is built on customer relations.  The front desk clerk, the counter clerk or even the security guards can make or break your business based on the impression they leave with customers.  Whether you are in a service-oriented business, manufacturing, education or health care field, your goal is to make that first impression lasting and gain loyalty from customers.

No matter what type of business you are in, the following are standard guidelines in handling customer relations.

1.  Make the customer feel like royalty when attending to them.  Pamper your customers.  You must have well-oriented and well-trained customer relations personnel to assist them.  Everyone in the selling area or in the place where customers are expected to move around must know their job. Keep your customer relations personnel updated on how to handle customers.  This is proven to be an effective way of keeping customers and getting them to return. Make customers feel like they are part of the company, or a member of your corporate family. Value them.

2.  Handle complaints properly.  Each one of us have been customers of various establishments. We know that a customer is always right - as companies we should stand by that principle.  The basic steps in handling customer complains are: to listen, then validate the complaint and act on it promptly.  The key to handling customer complaint is to act quickly.  It is said that one dissatisfied customer is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of lost sales, word of mouth travels.  Protect the company from losing more because of one complaint.

The performance of the customer relations department plays an integral part in helping the company sell whatever product or service they are offering.  Needless to say, customer relations should be a paramount concern, especially for your front line workers..

It is interesting to sometimes eavesdrop on shoppers and listen to their candid comments about the establishments they visited.  You will definitely hear different comments and points of view.  If a company would like to know the needs and desires of its customers, then conducting a customer survey is one of the best tools to use.

There are 3 areas of customer survey which are all essential for the company to know.

Customer Service Survey

The objective here is to provide the company valuable data from customer feedback.  Management could then improve the service of the company to become more competitive in its field. It could also provide the management team guidelines for strategic planning and decision-making.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

This area concerns the product, services, pricing, and satisfaction with the business relationship.  The details in this survey directly give vital feedback from customers regarding their desires, wants and needs. These data are essential for the growth of the company.  Here, the behavior of the customers is revealed through the answers they give. With it, management could make adjustments to suit the satisfaction of customers.

Customer Loss Review Results

Being able to win back one customer is like winning back a thousand or more.  It is therefore important to know the reasons why the customer has stopped doing business with the company. There is a need to identify the root cause of the problem.  If winning back the customer is no longer possible, it is imperative to take corrective measures so as to prevent future loss of customers.

Taken from The Credit Union Journal

Increasingly, measuring “member satisfaction” is becoming Old School. While still important, how a credit union integrates what it learns in getting member satisfaction feedback into its operations, product offerings and member interaction is where the emerging focus is, according to several analysts.

Case in point, Allegiance, a South Jordan, Utah-based company that specializes in taking member feedback to a deeper level. “In the old days the talk was of customer satisfaction then of customer loyalty,” said Chris Cottle, VP-corporate marketing. “We believe engagement is a better term. It’s more proactive. Ultimately, if someone is really engaged, they will go out of their way to have association with your company, such as people do with Apple Computer or Southwest Airlines. What we are able to do is enable a credit union to measure, manage and act upon the information.” Cottle pointed to the emerging field of Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM). “Most companies are in the print survey space,” Cottle said. “Those are just data collection tools. But what do you do with it? There is no management, no analytics.” Cottle said credit unions have spent considerable funds to acquire member data, but they’re unsure how to increase lifetime value for the member. It is in doing that that Allegiance says it delivers ROI to client CUs. “We’re able to take the data and put measurements around it,” he said. “It lets you make the management decisions.”

(c) 2007 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

MR software companies Confirmit and Pulse Train have completed a merger. CEO Henning Hansen explained that he had seen an increasing trend in companies looking to standardize on a single vendor and believes that the firm is now well positioned to deliver against that requirement.

Confirmit will integrate Pulse Train products and technologies into its platform.

One way to benchmark the level of satisfaction of your customers is through a customer satisfaction index. One of the leading customer satisfaction indexes in the world is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI helps to determine how satisfied consumers in the US are, so that consumer behavior can be understood. ACSI personnel question around 80,000 Americans per year regarding how satisfied they feel about any products and services they may have used for that year. Even the satisfaction of the public with government services is rated by the ACSI.

You may access information about the ACSI every quarter, after survey results have been collected and analyzed by ACSI analysts. Some of those who use the ACSI information are:

• industry trade groups
• market investors
• market analysts
• corporate and organizational decision makers
• and academic researchers.

Ordinary consumers may also opt to read ACSI results so they can be better informed about what products and services to buy the next year.

To get their data, the ACSI personnel conduct telephone interviews based on the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing system. Respondents are usually randomly chosen and screened first via the sampling method called random-digit dial technique. The ACSI generally concerns itself with customer service satisfaction about over 200 companies that operate in 10 economic areas and 43 industries all in all. Because the ACSI has been proven to be quite reliable and credible, organizations and interest groups from other countries have also begun adopting the ACSI in their countries as well.

Why, you might ask, do you start a blog about enterprise feedback management with a post about CRM?

The answer’s simple. They are equally important to the success of your company.

Keeping tabs on your customer’s information is an important piece of your company’s operations. Can you imagine what would happen if your company had to manually monitor and file all of the customer information that has been gathered over the years? This is why CRM software was developed - to ensure that critical customer information is managed and handled efficiently. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) simply helps corporations capture, manage and store their customer’s personal information.

Where CRM’s fall short is in their ability to analyze data. This is where EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) software comes to the rescue. EFM - a relatively new industry - helps manage customer and employee feedback company-wide. While CRM helps you capture , manage and store your customers personal information, EFM helps you capture, manage and analyze your customer and employee feedback - making your organization more customer and employee-centric.

In the age of advanced information technology, automation of each and every type of customer information gathered is a vital part of a business’ success. This is why CRM & EFM software are both important.

The right CRM software will allow your company to:

• Increase productivity
• Develop effective marketing strategies
• Reduce production and operational costs through proper information management
• Improve the customer’s overall experience with the company

The right EFM software will compliment your CRM software by:

• Helping you manage feedback company-wide
• Quickly route and manage your companies feedback
• Predict where in your company you can focus to improve customer and employee loyalty
• Gauge how satisfied your customers and employees are

Aside from these benefits, the right CRM & EFM software will allow you to identify your company’s most valuable clients and customers. This way, the preferred and loyal customers can be given more priority so that their business can be retained. In the same vein, customers who have a good potential of remaining loyal to the company can be given incentives to stay with the company.

On the administrative side, these software packages will make customer interactions flow smoothly and data analysis can be done more efficiently. With all these advantages and more, CRM & EFM software is truly something that major corporations in any industry cannot do without.