4 Common Pitfalls of Customer Relationship Management

Building strong relationships with your customers is more important nowadays than ever given the amount of competition and increased consumer expectations. This requires companies to go beyond their traditional processes and approaches to offer each customer a tailored experience. There are many reasons why businesses struggle in their customer relationship management efforts, but let’s take a look at some of the most common mistakes companies make in managing relationships with their customers. 

1. They are Focused on the Short Terms Gains 

A lot of companies give their customers the attention they deserve up until the sale is made. This is very shortsighted because you are losing out on a lot more revenue over the long term than that initial sale is worth. You need to make a distinction between the one-off profit you might make on an average sale, which ignores the bigger picture, and the total aggregate profit your average customer represents over the lifetime of their business relationship with you. Statistics show that the cost of acquiring a new customer can be as much as five times the costs of maintaining existing ones. Selling to existing customers is a lot easier since they already have experience with your products or services and you have already won their trust. However, you constantly have to work to maintain this trust as well. 

One of the reasons for this problem is that a lot of companies simply do not have the human resources available on staff to manage the after-sale processes. They understand the lifetime value of repeat customers, but it would simply be too expensive to hire a team of customer care representatives. This is where outsourcing can be a viable alternative for a lot of businesses since it allows you to hire the number of people you need while keeping costs under control and maintaining positive customer relationships to ensure repeat business. 

2. Lack of Data Ownership 

All of your sales and marketing efforts are producing a treasure trove of information in terms of the methods that are working and resonating with your customers. There needs to be clear data ownership to make sure this data is captured and analyzed. For example, there may be a significant increase in the number of people unsubscribing from your email campaigns, which could signal problems in the content, frequency, or your targeting. Another problem is focusing on the wrong data. A lot of business leaders like to spotlight vanity metrics like the number of website visitors, but if you are not getting any form submissions, this is a huge problem. Therefore, be sure to identify the data you need to be tracking and put people in charge of verifying that this information is being analyzed. 

3. Addressing Comments in an Untimely and Impersonal Manner

Recent data shows that customers who had a negative experience are twice to three times more likely to write an angry review than customers who had a great experience are to post a happy review. You constantly need to be aware of what customers are saying about your business online, but this is a very time-consuming process. This is another area where outsourcing can come to the rescue since you will be able to hire someone who can monitor social media and other websites to your business reviews and respond to both positive and negative ones accordingly. 

4. Relying Too Much on Automation 

While it is true that automation eliminates the need to perform redundant processes and tasks, you should never allow the software to take over your customer engagement. People get frustrated with automated reply systems and chatbots and just want a more personal approach to their needs and issues. According to the latest data, almost 90% of customers want to speak to a live support agent which shows the level of personalization your clients are demanding. If expanding your in-house customer care team would be too expensive, consider setting up an offshore team to provide your customers with the customization they are looking for. 

Mindy Support Can Take Care of All Your Customer Care Needs

Whether you are looking to expand your current support team or set up a new one, Mindy Support can provide you with all of the people and services you need. We have extensive experience actualizing customer care projects of all sizes and complexity which allows us to provide our clients with industry insights and best practices on how to launch the project and ensure that all KPIs are met. We have rigorous QA processes in place to make sure your customers are getting the best support possible and we will help cover any time you need and provide support in languages other than English.