The Customer Is Not Always Right

The Customer Is Always Right…

If you work in any sort of industry where you interact with customers, you’ve most likely heard that idiom.

It’s been drilled into service industry workers for as long as there have been customers. Forever!

It’s a service mantra that we must repeat to ourselves during a situation when they clearly are not.

As a blanket approach to customer service, it’s not exactly the worst advice. You’re more likely to succeed by offering good customer service than not. There are some exceptions to the rule however…

But, it just doesn’t hold true for every situation. In some situations, you are doing a disservice to your customers if you allow them to exert this “rule”.

Customer Relationships

In today’s modern era, a seller can be anyone. Online, multi-national retailer, large corporation, franchise, the list is endless.

The list of who is a customer is even more numerous.

There are two camps in most customer interactions. At its most basic, there’s a seller, and a customer. The relationship for either cannot exist without the other.

As a consumer, you want the best possible service and product in any transaction.

As a business, you want to ensure your service is the best you can give your customers.

But sometimes, these two simple concepts don’t align. The customer can feel like they are deserving of more, and the supplier can feel they have to give in to make a sale.

Building a customer relationship is more than making a sale. The product or service will dictate the type of relationship you’re likely to have.

It’s important to know what the relationship is with your customers, and how to create it.

Depending on your industry and sales cycle, these steps can be over a period of days through to many years.

CRM Software Can Help

Customer service definition:

“the provision of service to customers before, during and after a sale” – Wikipedia

Accentis Enterprise is not the sort of product that people pick up on a whim at the end of the day like a Big Mac.

Our sales process is longer, and building relationships with our customers takes time. It starts by reading a blog post such as this one, and after a few more steps, contacting us to find out more.

We need information from our customers too. Without knowing their requirements and requests, we don’t know if we’re suitable. You don’t want to be three or four months into an implementation only for it to fall over near the end. All because a few questions weren’t asked at the right moments.

Accentis Enterprise contains a process driven CRM/CMS system. It will help you to develop and follow a process that’s used to build relationships.

A CRM system will track phone calls, memos, attach electronic documents and more. This tracks every interaction with customers in fine detail, creating a customer record.

By recording all the information you’re building a relationship. This helps to improve sales and after-sales service too, and fully manage your business.

The Customer Is Not Always Right

How can you use CRM technology to help customers always be right, even when they might be wrong?

Building relationships and tracking their interactions is just the start. You need to use that data to improve each interaction with each new customer, and previous ones.

When you use a Customer Management System (CMS), diligence pays off in the long run.

Constant editing of details and adding new information their record is essential. Not only for you, but for them also.

Imagine being able to predict which of your customers might need a new product or service. All based on their previous sales, you can now easily market to them a new opportunity.

This shows your customer that you care about the relationship and know what will help them.

Knowledge of previous transactions will give you an edge. The service and repair division can pre-empt any product recalls or warranty issues.

What Does Accentis Enterprise Help With?

Accentis Enterprise keeps track of all these interactions, and more. It will save your business valuable time and money through efficient record viewing. Employees can find the information on a customer fast, with a compete history record. No longer do you need to sort through paper files or ask other employees to remember details. Everything you need is right there, ready with a simple search.

The customer is always right, but one day a customer may be wrong, and they don’t go through with a sale. What tools do you have in place to learn from the experience and improve?

The next customer with the same issue will receive a better experience. They might buy a different product or come back to your enterprise later.

This is a much better outcome than losing a sale completely. You might even win more business because that customer will tell others about their experience.

If that first customer didn’t complain, you might have never got the chance a second time. Then you would have lost two customers instead of one.

The customer wasn’t right, but they helped you to improve, and will continue to do so. By recording everything in your CRM, you have made more sales.

So maybe in a sense, the customer was right.

Conclusion

Accentis Enterprise CRM can help you win more customers and keep the ones you have already. It will provide you with solid reports that you can use to further staff training and sales.

It’s a solid enterprise solution for small to medium-sized business.

The customer, sales and CRM module is fully-integrated into other important modules. These can include Financial Accounting, Manufacturing & MRP, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Job Costing and more.

Take the opportunity to use Accentis Enterprise by booking a demo. See for yourself how to make the customer always be right!

If you want to know more, contact us to make it happen. We’ll add you to our CRM…