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Business is about creating and maintaining customer relationships.
But what is a relationship? It means communication. If you ask
people in a work setting, "What would improve work, profits and
customer service the most where you work?" the answer is almost
always "Better communication!" Communication plays a vital part
in success or failure of any business.
But what communication tool is used most frequently in the world?
Internet, e-mail, TV, radio? Definitely not! The most essential
communication tool is a phone and hardly any business works
without a phone. And whenever you are in contact with people by
a phone regarding your business, it is also a representation of
your business.
Sounds good, huh? But the important question occurs,
"What is the effective way to improve communication via a phone?"
The computer-based answer (I am a programmer, not a psychologist)
is personalization of your customer with call center.
Learn Something New about Your Customer Constantly.
A successful marketing campaign starts with a keen understanding
of your customers. When you are curious (not snoopy!) about the
people who call you, you are giving them respect. People love to
be respected! Find out how their family is doing, or more about
their favor hobby. If you know your customers more personally
than employees of your competitor know their customers, it's
easier to delight them.
Build a Customer Database.
A centralized database is essential to delivering a unified view
of customers and contacts. That is goal number one. Create a
personal data warehouse about your customers on your PC. Keep
track of your contacts made with customers via a phone. If you
know when your customers called and what information they
searched for or how many times they've called about a particular
product, that lets you track customer behavior. If you know this,
you can respond to your customers effectively and efficiently.
Transmute Your Computer and Phone into Call Center.
Have you ever heard about call center?
I suppose you automatically think that it is something extra
expensive and complicated. And it is just for the "big boys"
like Sony, SAP, Dell and other Fortune 100 companies. But what
is a call center (I prefer the term "contact center")? As a rule
this service includes contact management tools, telephony
integration and tools personalizing every customer interaction.
Great! You have the same: a phone, a customer database and
contact manager software (see below). What hinders you to make
your own small contact center right now, which is increasingly
at the heart of your company's day-to-day interface with its
customers. By recording and analyzing the calls and other
interactions between your contact center and its' customers you
can listen to and act on customer feedback to improve you skills
and business processes, leading to improved customer service -
and hence customer loyalty.
Discovering Value Hidden in Your Data.
Effective customer experience management solutions must capture,
store and replay all live interactions between the customer and
your contact center. Capturing this live information and
embedding it within your customer database gives you the
opportunity to share the information collected in the contact
center with other parts of your business. If you fail to do this
you are missing out on a big opportunity to make every profitable
customer feel that you care about them personally and help
establish a new business relationship with them.
Finding the Right Software.
What difficulties are in selection of the right software for your
small business call center?
The biggest one is chaos. Obtaining a complete understanding of a
company's customer requires the ability to store and manage a
myriad of different information from a variety of sources. In
addition your demands to kept data level can be varied from day
to day. Yesterday you were satisfied if your customer database
stored their names, phone numbers, addresses, birthdays. Today's
demand is to keep customers' emails, webs, credit cards. Tomorrow
you maybe wish to store in the database data about customers' cars,
their favorite colors or birthday of their grandmothers.
But as a rule similar contact management software have only
strictly fixed (structured) numbers of fields in their databases.
If your selected computer application is too small and simple it
will not be enough for you. Or these data fields will not be used
completely if an application is too big and complicated
(and expensive!).
iReferent - Aim to End Result.
iReferent is an contact solution for small and home business that
decide the foregoing problems. It provides a strong feature set
that stands up well against other similar programs on the market.
However, iReferent's real achievement is its unique database
structure: at any time you can input into the database any (!)
number of the description fields, from name of your customers to
their car marks. But for all that you might fill only those
specific fields in every record, which are really necessary. Also
this contact manager gives you the opportunity to keep the detail
phone call history.
Want to know more? Visit our web site at
http://www.sitex.com.ua/en/products/iReferent or contact me via
e-mail to sergkruts@yahoo.com.
You can also download your personal Call Center from here
http://sitex.com.ua/download/CallCenter_e.zip
(file size is 981 Kb, 30 days free trial) and estimate it
yourself.
About the Author
Software developer with 9 years of programmer experience.
Author of iReferent Light - easy-to-use Contact Manager for small business and home business.
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