The customer is now officially king and has more power than ever. That’s why we’re seeing a gradual shift towards better customer service and relationships. As a matter of fact, many believe that customer service is the last frontier when it comes to market differentiation.

A company that has great relationships with its client base builds positive brand awareness and
engagement. Those are usually also better able to respond to their clients’ needs and work on
constant improvement. Improving relationships is something all businesses can do; it all starts with a true will to work on improving your customers’ experience and putting the right systems in place.
Here are a few ways businesses can improve customer relationships.

Offer Great Deals and Keep Track of Them

Everyone loves a good deal, and most understand how powerful they can be from a seller’s
standpoint. However, they can also lead to losses in certain cases, especially when the process is not monitored properly.

This is where rebate management comes in. Rebate management solutions like e-bate, for instance, will allow you to keep track of your deals, and have a clear workflow for instituting them; awarding them and automating them. But more importantly, they allow you to gather real data on transactions made through these rebates.

You can then determine which rebates were able to secure you a good ROI, see which type of
rebates worked the best, and which ones are actually a cost. This will then allow you to focus on
campaigns that work and launch them at specific times to get an instant and predictable boost in
sales.

Instil Trust and Practice Transparency

You should have nothing to hide as an organisation, and you should try to be as transparent as you can with your employees, clients and shareholders. Brands who are consistent in their transparency are rewarded with more trust. The more they know about what you do, how you do it and your actual expertise, the more your clients will be willing to trust you for solutions.

Don’t Put it All on Sales

If you want to build a more trusting relationship with your audience, you also have to change your sales and marketing department’s approach. Too many still believe that the job of their sales people is to constantly pitch or upsell products. Instead, they should focus more on aftersales care and trying to getting to know their clients. This way, your product launches will feel more like announcements then pitches and your trusting clientele will be more willing to look into them in detail and make a sound and informed buying decision.

You should also teach your sales team to deliver tailor-made content based on a lead’s position in
the sales funnel. Providing the right content at the right moment could be all that it takes to clear
doubts and hesitation by genuinely informing your client instead of pushing them.
Building a strong relationship with your customers is more important than ever, especially if you’re in a crowded space. Make sure that you follow these few tips, and always work on improving your customer experience and service if you want results.

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post 3 Ways Businesses Can Improve Customer Relationships appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.

UK brands are undermining consumer trust and risking revenues by failing to deliver consistent, multichannel customer service, according to the 2019 Eptica Digital Trust Study.

While brands answered 69% of all routine queries via the web, email, Facebook and Twitter, this masked wide gaps between different brands, sectors and channels. For example, a bank took 8 days to respond to an email. One fashion retailer answered a tweet about ethical sourcing policies in 17 minutes, yet another took 50 hours.

Trust is increasingly central to customer relationships. 89% of consumers surveyed said they either will stop buying from brands that they don’t trust or will spend less. Around half (49%) said they would switch immediately. Building trust begins with delivering on basic promises – 59% ranked giving satisfactory, consistent answers as a top three factor in creating trustworthiness, while 63% rated making processes easy and seamless as key.

The web was the most accurate and comprehensive channel for customer experience, with brands answering an average of 75% of routine queries. It was followed by Facebook, where brands successfully responded to 57% of questions (nearly doubling from 30% in 2017). This was significantly ahead of Twitter (45%), despite the channel’s reputation for delivering customer service.

Email brought up the rear. 37% of brands satisfactorily answered a basic question, with average speed ten times slower than social media. Chat continued to grow in importance, with 44% of brands claiming to offer it – yet just 26% had it operational when tested, a slight improvement on 2017’s 24%.

The Eptica Digital Trust Study builds on research first conducted in 2012 by customer experience software provider Eptica. It combined real-world evaluations of 50 brands in five sectors with consumer research on attitudes to customer experience and trust. Evaluation questions included asking about multi-policy discounts (insurance), ethical sourcing policies (fashion), changing a booking (travel), cancelling debit cards (banking) and allergy labelling (food and drink).

“Brands face multiple challenges when it comes to customer experience,” said Olivier Njamfa, CEO and Co-Founder, Eptica. “Consumer expectations are continually rising, while the volume and complexity of queries and interactions are growing. Trust is crucial to engagement and loyalty, but the 2019 Eptica Digital Trust Study shows that many brands are falling at the first hurdle, with their inability to get the basics right undermining reputation and revenues.”

While brands answered 69% of queries overall, nearly a third either did not receive a response – or that replies failed to answer the question. This backs up consumer beliefs that brands are ignoring them – just 8% of respondents said that brands were listening all the time, missing out on the insight needed to drive improvements and strengthen trust.

Inconsistency and gaps growing

The Study found growing gaps between best and worst performers, between channels and within sectors:

• Fashion retailers successfully answered 60% of questions across all channels, while insurers only managed under half (46%)
• In the travel sector, three brands scored 100% on the web – yet two rivals only answered 40% of questions.
• None of the banks surveyed successfully responded to an emailed question – yet 80% of them answered it on Twitter, and 45% on Facebook.

At a time of greater pressure on resources, brands need to take a more holistic view across channels to drive a consistent, efficient customer experience that builds trust.

As well as accuracy, the Eptica Digital Trust Study also measured consistency between channels. Well over half (58%) of companies were completely inconsistent with no answers matching on more than one channel. Consistency varied wildly within sectors – for example, one travel company said on Twitter that it was free to amend a booking, but responded on Facebook saying it would cost £35 per person to do so.

The study evaluated 50 UK brands, split equally between the fashion, food and drink, travel, insurance and banking sectors. Brands were rated on their ability to answer five routine questions via their websites, as well as their speed, accuracy and consistency when responding to email, Twitter, Facebook and chat. Additionally, 1,000 UK consumers were surveyed on their attitude to trust, its relationship with customer experience and on loyalty and brand reputation. All research was completed in Q1 2019.

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post Revealed: Facebook And Web Lead The Way For UK Customer Experience appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.

Customer experience (CX) can be described as the “product” of an interaction between a business and a customer. Instantly making it more tangible, and transforming it into a commodity in its own right, thinking of CX in this way ensures you’ll keep it front-and-centre in your strategies.

Knowing how essential CX is to your business, we’ve also put together several ways you can get the most out of this important product.

Create customer personas

How well do you actually know your customers? Businesses often create products, develop services and put together campaigns with something of a scattergun approach to marketing, measuring success and failure by data and statistics only.

Creating a customer or buyer persona not only saves you time and money, it also lets you know what they want from you – including how, when and why they want your product or service. You will also learn to identify essential “touchpoints” – the key moments in CX where your customers want to be engaged or receive a particular service.

Give your customers what they want

By specifically charming this key demographic, you won’t only be on target to retain your customers – you could stimulate some new business, too. According to CX statistics gathered by SuperOffice, 72% of people who had positive customer experiences told 6 or more people what happened.

If you’ve got your customer personas right, you’ll have a good idea of how your customers want to be contacted, engaged by marketing and spoken to – and what they want to buy from you.

Evaluate your communications systems

You can’t communicate with customers effectively if your systems aren’t up to scratch. Is your website optimised for mobile? Are your staff able to handle the call volume? Many businesses are choosing to integrate how they manage their voice, data and mobile communications, in order to ensure the management of multi-channel CX is centralised.

The UK-based Gamma, a company providing this kind of service to the business market, has become more popular due to the combined flexibility and scalability of the firm’s services.

Make it easy to communicate with you

This might be a surprise, especially given the amount of e-commerce that takes place these days, but 78% of people still like to engage with a human during customer communications. Whether that’s through live web chat, or over the telephone, you will know from creating your customer personas what your audience want from you.

If you’ve identified that your telephone system needs updating, the new model will give you more data, more control, and more efficient management of all your ingoing and outbound calls.

Perform regular audits

Finally, once you’ve created your customer personas, evaluated your communications systems and implemented any essential changes , do it all again. Not straight away, but within a reasonable timeframe from “now”. Set a date, something like 3, 6 or 12 months from now, when you will audit how your CX improvements have been received.

If you’ve upgraded your communications service or started to make better use of the data available to you, your business will now be able to see if it is meeting essential CX expectations. If something does need tweaking again, just head right back to the top of this article and start the process again.

This is an article provided by our partners network. It might not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of our editorial team and management.

Contributed content

Hernaldo Turrillo

Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.

The post 5 Ways To Improve The Customer Experience In Your Business appeared first on OpenBusinessCouncil Directory.