The Cardinal Rule of Customer Relationship Management

10/14/2010 at 12:37 pm by The Sage ERP Team

The customer is the bedrock of any good company. After all, customers keep a company in business – they buy its products, use its services and tell their friends about their experiences. If you treat your customers right, they’ll return the favor tenfold by leaving you positive reviews, recommending you to their friends and returning to buy from you over and over again. On the other hand, if customers leave your business unsatisfied, unhappy or confused, they can damage your company reputation with just a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse.

Never has customer relationship management been more important than in the digital world of smartphones, the internet and social media.

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once said. “If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

There is, however, one simple rule to simplify dealing with customers: Treat them as individuals.

That may seem like it could get complicated, but customer relationship management software, or CRM, is designed to help companies achieve the goal of looking holistically at each customer and addressing the specific needs that make customers feel valued and appreciated.

If you handle customer feedback in a way that is personal, thoughtful and individualized, customers are significantly more likely to give you positive recommendations to friends and family – which is consistently ranked as one of the most important ways a business distinguishes itself from its competition and acquires new customers. In other words, being patient and kind to your customers can help win you new business. However, being curt or angry, dismissing customer complaints or responding with thoughtless form letters won’t only lose you the customer in question, but his or her negative review of your company could even cause some of your existing customers to switch.

CRM can help a business take a more individualized approach to each customer – so it can cater more appropriately to every customer’s needs.