Digitally Enhancing Customer Relationships

For many businesses, customer relationships are the foundation for success, yet they are too often left to chance rather than carefully managed. With an abundance of options for the customer, selecting a new supplier in almost any category is just a click away. Ensuring that both new and existing customers remain connected and loyal to your organization is imperative.

But as you gain more customers, maintaining robust relationships and serving each client with the same degree of personal attention can become quite challenging. At the same time, customers remain the most important source of insights about your product or service. Consequently, every modern business needs a viable method for maintaining these connections, and in the digital age, companies are increasingly turning to software solutions to improve and leverage their customer relationships.

While there are many ways to use software — as evidenced by the exploding SaaS market — improving your customer relationships is a surefire way software can deliver increased value to your operations.

Customer Success

Customer Success is an emerging role in business and is the function responsible for retaining customers, increasing the value you provide to them and ensuring customers are satisfied. Today, a myriad of software applications allow users to collect, store and keep track of both personal and professional details on their customers, allowing for a more bespoke approach, even if your company has thousands of clients.

This increased customer focus allows organizations to develop a more thorough understanding of clients as individuals, including what they want and need, and ideally anticipate those needs. This understanding is one of the best ways to know if customers are satisfied today and helps create a solid impression of the existing opportunities that can help them in the future. Because customer success isn’t just a sales strategy, it’s crucial that companies have a process in place that allows them to capture and leverage the data required to intimately understand their customers.

Integration and Collaboration

Customer information isn’t of any value if only one individual or a small team has access. Today, software tools make it easy for your entire company to share important information about customers and work together to deliver on a customer’s needs and wants.

Because every interaction with a customer can result in items added to your organization’s to-do list, forward-thinking companies have optimized their processes to integrate applications cross-functionally. With each customer conversation, imagine being able to update your entire team in Slack, log a CRM activity in Salesforce and create tasks in Trello with one click of your mouse.

Knowing exactly what your customers are thinking and saying can provide critical information back to the team — like what additional features, products or services are being requested, and the context through which those requests were being made. Tools that facilitate collaboration provide access to the data needed to provide a seamless customer experience.

Communication

Consistent and accurate communication is vital, or the message being conveyed can turn into misunderstanding and information can fall through the cracks. When important information goes unnoticed, unchecked or neglected, more opportunities to fail customers are created.

Communication, not only between teams and customers but also between the applications your team already uses, is key to a productive, cross-functional organization that delivers for customers faster than their peers. If your organization’s suite of productivity software doesn’t communicate with other applications, the likelihood that important information will fall through the cracks is increased.

Unlocking Improved Customer Relationships with Productivity Software

In order to improve customer relationships and ultimately be successful in the long run, organizations need tools that play nicely with other software, focus on customer success and encourage collaboration and communication for enhanced internal alignment. Innovative software applications allow enterprises to develop and maintain robust relationships with their customers, leveraging a higher level of connection for enhanced loyalty.

In the modern workplace, productivity software is becoming a lever that organizations can’t afford to overlook. Getting more done in less time is something business owners have strived to achieve since the dawn of work — and software is finally allowing your teams to do more with less.

Software tools help organizations capture additional information about their customers and better use the data gathered to provide better products and services, quickly taking advantage of the opportunities at hand in real time. If you aren’t evaluating the affordable and easy-to-use software tools readily available to improve your customer relationships, you need to rethink your strategy.

‍

This article originally appeared on Kinja.