Anticipate Your Customer Needs
As I was reading a www.Business2Community.com blog article about the Importance of Anticipating Your customer needs, from Daniel Burrus, he got me thinking...
A useful CRM knowledge database is an excellent indicator of past, current and potential future.
It is the information you only have about the conversations of importance between your employees and your customers.
Listening and gathering customer intelligence to serve them better than your competitor -to really care about their success is helped tremendously with a contact and customer database system.
And focusing on the characteristics of your ideal customer will guide your business with ever more clarity and positive direction.
In your CRM tool box you have knowledge available to...
- Help your employees actively listen, then understand what your customer is really asking to have solved or given a better opportunity to win.
- Help them make it easy to enter this information- to use their laptop in the field, to use their iPad, or to use their smart phone that always seems to be attached to their hands.
- Help them make it easy to find both specific information of these past conversations
- But also to more easily view trends and gain perspectives.
Accessible, searchable, useful information:
A few ways is to have a memo of the key insights they need immediately when having a phone conversation. I don't know about you, but being able to pop up a person's record in CRM and quickly viewing our notes and emails of the last several conversations helps me be fully engaged quicker. While there I can also view if there are any outstanding service or support issues. Another is to quickly see the recent purchases and better yet to see the trending sales per quarter and Year-to-date compared to last year. (This is a common tailor-made solution lots of our clients ask for).
Daniel concludes his article with:
So instead of asking customers, “What would you like?” and giving it to them, you have to focus on the more important question. Ask yourself, “What would customers really want to do if they only knew they could do it? Then, look at the rapid advances in processing power, storage, and bandwidth and ask yourself, “Could I give it to them?”
What do you have in place to capture customer knowledge, transfer it among those who need access to it and make sure it's in a shared, trusted place?
Topics: Customer Experience Improvement Knowledge transfer Knowledge Capture Customer Communications